It is no longer news that Ether [ETH] had an impressive run in January. Within that 31-day period, the leading altcoin's price rallied by over 30%. The price jump also caused it to trade at levels last seen prior to FTX's unexpected implosion.

However, as profit-taking intensifies, the alt might be gearing up to shed some (if not all) of its gains in February. A look at ETH's Aroon Indicator on the daily chart revealed that bullish sentiment has weakened significantly in the past few weeks. The Aroon Up line was spotted at 21.43%.

Usually, when the Aroon Up line approaches zero, it suggests a weak uptrend and a distant recent high, indicating the possibility of a trend reversal.

Also, currently, there is a dearth of new demand to help drive up the alt's price.

Optimism, one of new blockchains with increasing TVL and onchain activity, has shown quite some weird action recently, namely extremely high transaction volume of stablecoins on it:

Average USDT or USDC transaction volume on Optimism is less then $10M. The anomaly above skyrocketed both to above $1B.

Liquidity mining? Washtrading?

We can check token velocity:

Velocity was super high around that days.

Active addresses?

No anomalies in active addresses, only a healthy trend.

Additionally, we can see a similar anomaly on OP token itself:

It also coincided with a top of OP price against BTC and maximal bullishness in crowd.

There is probably some connection, we just don't know which one. Do you?

Keep an eye on Optimism, there a lot of things going on.

Bonus details:

• This address was executing huge amount of transfers: https://optimistic.etherscan.io/address/0xb1f190bf99fea986e2d4d99abb5be1a649d5247d
• An example of transaction: https://optimistic.etherscan.io/tx/0x7655c475d270e12aaf4aec9f4df027693d011ab2807a0925e2ddea2f1c62d52a
• Charts used: https://app.santiment.net/s/2ItCEZTF