I love to watch the on chain data and in today’s case the increase is “normal” however that can be hard to see without a bit of digging.
So what is the cause? - Node payments are actively being sent as I type this. It is not completed in a single tx so the process dose tend to take a bit of time to complete. Wallet 0x40a8…01a2 is the “operations wallet” (just what I call it), we can see a transaction for just over 800k tokens sent to wallet 0x303E…b44B 18ish hours ago. This wallet as best I can tell is the one used for node payments (based on the transactions as well as some napkin math that shows the Tokens out roughly equal the expected USD value of monthly payments)
Is this really normal? - more or less yes, this months increase may be larger than normal (I don’t track this stat moth to month so can’t exactly speak to that) but generally speaking a sudden increase of 500-1000 wallets is what I normally expect to see when payouts are active. The number of holding wallets will then trend down over the course of the month as many operators sell their tokes to cover costs and avoid speculative risk, so it is hard to say how many are actually new addresses holding vs wallets that will quickly spend/send the tokens.