Justin Sun withdraws $30M ETH from Lido, sends to Huobi

Tron’s founder Justin Sun yesterday withdrew $29.7m worth of Ether (ETH) from Lido Finance, according to blockchain data, a day after he requested to unstake the tokens.

Lido Finance is a liquid staking platform that allows users to earn staking rewards while maintaining liquidity.

The crypto billionaire’s wallet received a total of 15,805 ETH from Lido’s withdrawal address, according to blockchain monitoring platform Arkham Intelligence. Data from here also revealed that the wallet then deposited 15,815 ETH to crypto exchange Huobi through an intermediary address. Early on Wednesday, a deposit of 1,000 BTC was made to Huobi too.

Such a move often comes with an intent of selling the tokens. Interestingly, all of this happened during a time when Ethereum, along with other crypto assets, rallied considerably.

As per CoinGecko, the altcoin king gained in value by over 12% in the last seven days. In this period, it also surged past $1,900 from a low of $1,630, causing the coin to trade in the green.

The positive shift in the crypto market could have been a result of the recent move towards embracing digital assets by traditional financial institutions like BlackRock and Deutsche Bank. While the former unveiled an exchange-traded fund (ETF) on Bitcoin and the latter applied for a cryptocurrency custody licence in Germany.

From an act of diversifying crypto holdings to just being cautious of the market, speculations around Sun’s latest move have been many. The digital assets held in public cryptocurrency wallets of Sun were valued at about $1.2bn, according to Arkham Intelligence.

Nevertheless, post the recent withdrawal, the wallets still boasted 287,855 of Lido’s staked ether (stETH) tokens. This is worth some $543m at the time of press.