The Ether (ETH) price selloff is gaining steam amid broader market risk aversion. However, its futures market is more active 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 is down almost 8% in the last seven days, with losses greater than 5% in the last 24 hours alone, according to data from CoinDesk.
“More and more people are giving up on ETH because it does not generate income and with higher bond yields, the staking returns are not attractive. The only buyer has been Bitmine, but they indicated that they will slow down their purchases,” Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, said in an email.
What makes the ether selloff particularly interesting is that open interest in ether futures has increased for the third day in a row, reaching a record 16.39 million tokens, according to data source Coinglass. That equates to a theoretical open interest of around $32.5 billion. In simple terms, more money is flowing into futures, a leveraged product that amplifies both profits and losses.
However, this record open interest, combined with a negative seven-day OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta (CVD) and falling spot price, points to aggressive net selling. A negative CVD indicates that the price action is being driven by traders placing bearish bets through market orders rather than passive limit orders.
The bearish bias is not limited to futures. US-listed Spot Ether ETFs have seen cumulative outflows of $401 million this month, more than reversing the $354 million inflow recorded in April, according to data from SoSoValue.
Sentiment around Ether has also deteriorated. The Ethereum Foundation has faced high-profile departures, including prominent contributors Carl Beekhuizen and Julian Ma.
“The Ethereum Foundation’s high-profile departures are also a sign that the original vision no longer captures these supporters,” Thielen said.
This trend extends to prominent opinion leaders and long-standing incumbents. David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless, recently announced that he sold his ETH holdings after concluding that the long-standing thesis that “ETH is money” has largely been realized.
Some analysts believe the market is increasingly questioning how much of Ethereum’s dominance in DeFi, tokenization and other sectors is returning to its native ETH token.
“The problem with Ethereum is not that the chain has stopped mattering. It’s that the market is questioning how the strength of Ethereum’s infrastructure translates into ETH,” Web3 research and consulting firm House of Chimera said in X.
The firm added that Ethereum still leads other smart contract blockchains in raw ecosystem development activity, with millions of significant events on GitHub, but noted that prices and sentiment can weaken faster than developer commitment.
