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A wallet address linked to Jump Trading transferred approximately 493,212 USD Coin (USDC) to Bybit in multiple transactions between 6:00 a.m and 9:00 a.m. UAE time on Aug. 7, as part of an ongoing asset unloading by the trading firm.

The Jump Trading wallet starting with 0x4f1a moved the stablecoins to a Bybit address labeled 0x664, on-chain data from Arkham Intelligence shows. Roughly two-thirds of the funds (348,408 of USDC), sent at the time to the Bybit wallet were then transferred to a Bybit hot wallet (0xf89).

Currently, Bybit’s 0x664’s holds over $219.370 worth of Tether (USDT), $30,000 in The Graph (GRT), nearly $5,000 of Uniswap (UNI), and some other coins, amounting to a total of $255,427.78. Meanwhile, the Jump Trading wallet still keeps more than $34 million worth of various assets. 

In the past few days, Jump Trading’s transfers caught the attention of the crypto community as it coincided with a time when the cryptocurrencies were recording a major drop in its value. 

‍Read more: Bitcoin, Ether ETFs see outflows as BTC, ETH price tumbles

Many analysts believed that Jump Trading’s dumping of Ether (ETH) may have been one of the factors that led to the sudden crash of the markets on Aug 5. On-chain analytics platform Spot on Chain reported that Jump Trading had deposited $231 million worth of ETH from July 25 to Aug. 4 to centralized exchanges such as Binance, OKX, Bybit, Coinbase, and Gate.io.

Following its ETH liquidation activities, Mads Eberhardt, a senior crypto analyst, noticed that Jump Trading had transferred huge amounts of USDC to Coinbase on Aug. 5, believing that the trading firm would be liquidating. After the USDC transfer, Jump Trading’s USDC holding decreased from $500 million to $450 million.    

Cake Group CEO Julian Hosp said that the crypto sell-offs were indeed caused by Jump Trading. Hosp claimed that Jump Trading could be “getting margin called in the traditional markets and need liquidity over the weekend.” Hosp also shared another scenario on why Jump Trading was liquidating, claiming that the trading firm could be exiting from the crypto industry.

One day after the rapid selloff by Jump Trading, Ether’s candlestick witnessed a 20% drop to the $2,115.03 region, trading deep in the oversold region, per TradingView. At the time of writing, ETH trades at $2,511.65, while still facing a 24.22% dip over the week.  

‍Read more: Spot Ether ETFs record nearly $100M inflows led by Blackrock’s ETHA