Rising spot activity alongside falling leverage suggests long-term buyers may be replacing speculative traders.
Ethereum (ETH) is trading at nearly 65% below its all-time high, with attention around the asset at an almost yearly low, even as its largest network upgrade since The Merge is due within weeks.
But an analyst tracking the setup says the gap between weak social interest and steady on-chain usage is the kind of divergence that has often come right before sharp moves for the cryptocurrency.
Glamsterdam Approaches as On-Chain Data Stays Firm
In a July 9 post on X, pseudonymous analyst Wise Crypto noted that the Ethereum network has been processing roughly 450,000 active addresses despite social media discussion sitting near yearly lows.
According to them, the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade could become a major catalyst, considering that it could increase Ethereum’s gas limit by three times and cut transaction fees by about 78%. It has also been said that it could lift throughput to about 10,000 transactions per second.
“Major catalyst. Minimal attention,” the market watcher wrote, while naming $1,754 as the ETH level worth watching. A sustained move above that area, according to them, could open the way toward $2,440, while failure to hold support could send the world’s second-largest crypto asset back toward $880.
Looking at CoinGecko data at the time of writing, ETH was trading just a few dollars below Wise Crypto’s stated resistance level, having dipped slightly (about 1%) in 24 hours but still gaining nearly 7% during the past week and about 3% over 30 days.
That quiet backdrop is sitting alongside some unusual exchange data shared by CryptoQuant contributor Amr Taha, who said that Binance’s 30-day ETH open interest change fell to -594,000 ETH earlier in the week, marking its deepest contraction since August 2024. Around the same time, ETH spot volume on OKX climbed to $2.09 billion, 49% higher than its best reading of the year, which was recorded on February 5.
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According to Taha, the pairing is notable because a leverage flush alongside rising spot volumes probably means that speculators are leaving the market while spot buyers are continuing to stack ETH and not that there’s a broad retreat from the asset.
Executives Talk Up the Cycle While Traders Stay Cautious
Ethereum has been rejected at $1,800 three times this week, but that didn’t stop Consensys co-founder Joseph Lubin from saying Wednesday that the “Summer of Ethereum Love is gaining steam,” pointing to newly launched steward groups like Ethlabs working alongside the Ethereum Foundation, and citing the network’s eleven years of uptime as a draw for institutions.
Analyst Michaël van de Poppe struck a similar tone over the weekend, arguing that “the worst period for ETH is over” after the token closed out its third straight quarterly loss of more than 20%, a first in its history. He called the odds of a fourth consecutive drop statistically low and pointed to the pending CLARITY Act as a potential liquidity driver.
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