I've never seen anything quite like this. This whole drop appears to be being bought margin long on Bitfinex. Interestingly, about a week ago, there was a similar mass closing of short positions and opening of longs at a similar price region.
As seems to be my common refrain - I'd prefer to show this action on a shorter chart than 15m where the action is clearer, but alas, that's the shortest we can publish on.
The SEC hearing on whether ETH is a security is planned for later today. I'm somewhat surprised we didn't have some strong statement or signal leaked as news today, given how the Congressional testimony and G20 events earlier this year played out. The argument that ETH is a security appears pretty weak, would be massively disruptive, would run counter to the previous very bullish statements by regulatory heads before Congress earlier this year, and in general would shoot the US in the foot in the international cryptocurrency gold rush. It seems extremely unlikely that the news from this hearing will be anything other than bullish.
So, that's my working hypothesis here. I'd be concerned if the longs started closing in massive number, but unless that happens, this looks like a very cynical but extraordinarily bullish set of whale games. Exact bottom hard to guess, but I don't think you need to catch the exact bottom here. Possible that whoever's doing this tries for another leg down to build even further, but I'm not counting on it.
I was personally long ETH before this and based on this read I'm basically throwing everything I can move around in crypto at it, so I guess I have my neck out pretty far on this if I'm wrong.
I'm an amateur hobbyist and your definitely shouldn't take anything I say as financial advice. I'm interested in any feedback.