Ether’s (ETH) price selloff is gathering steam amid broader market risk aversion. Still, its futures market is busier than ever, creating a notable divergence with bearish implications.
ETH fell below $2,000 on Thursday morning for the first time since late March. It has fallen nearly 8% over the past seven days, with losses of over 5% in the past 24 hours alone, according to CoinDesk data.
“More and more people giving up on ETH as it doesn’t generate revenue and with higher bond yields the return on investment is unattractive. The only buyer has been Bitmine, but they indicated they will slow down their buying,” Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, said in an email.
What makes ether’s selloff particularly interesting is that open interest in ether futures has increased for the third day in a row, hitting a record 16.39 million tokens, according to data source Coinglass. That equates to a theoretical open interest rate of about $32.5 billion. Simply put, more money is flowing into futures, a leveraged product that amplifies both gains and losses.
However, this record high interest rate, combined with a negative seven-day OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta (CVD) and the falling spot price point to aggressive net selling. A negative CVD indicates that price action is being driven by traders taking bearish bets via market orders rather than passive limit orders.
The bearish bias is not limited to futures. U.S.-listed spot ether ETFs have seen cumulative outflows of $401 million this month, more than reversing the $354 million inflows recorded in April, according to SoSoValue data.
The mood around Ether has also worsened. The Ethereum Foundation has faced high-profile departures, including prominent contributors Carl Beekhuizen and Julian Ma.
“High-profile departures from the Ethereum Foundation are also a sign that the original vision is no longer capturing those supporters,” Thielen said.
This trend extends to prominent thought leaders and long-time holders. David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless, recently announced that he was selling his ETH holdings after concluding that the long-standing thesis that “ETH is money” has largely been played out.
Some analysts believe the market is increasingly questioning how much of Ethereum’s dominance in DeFi, tokenization and other sectors flows back to its parent token ETH.
“Ethereum’s problem isn’t that the chain has stopped meaning. It’s that the market is questioning how Ethereum’s infrastructure strength translates back to ETH,” Web3 research and consulting firm House of Chimera said on X.
The firm added that Ethereum still leads other smart contract blockchains in raw ecosystem development activity with millions of meaningful GitHub events, but noted that prices and sentiment can weaken faster than developer engagement.
