• Ethereum's 90-day profitable-supply average slid toward 2018, 2020 and 2022 bear-market bottom levels on November 3.

• Market analyst Cryptollica published the profitability comparison in a November 3 post.

• Ethereum price stood at $2,263, down 1.4% over 24 hours, at the time of writing.

Profitable Supply Slides Toward Prior Cycle Lows

The share of Ethereum (ETH) supply held in profit has fallen toward territory last seen at the major bottoms of previous downtrends. On November 3, on-chain data showed the 90-day moving average of profitable ETH supply sliding toward the zones recorded at the 2018, 2020 and 2022 bear market lows. Market analyst Cryptollica published the comparison in a November 3 post, setting the current profitability curve against the same gauge from three earlier cycles in which comparable readings preceded meaningful price recoveries. The Ethereum price stands at $2,263, down 1.4% over the past 24 hours, leaving the network's market cap near $276 billion and a growing portion of addresses holding coins below their average acquisition cost.

The gauge works by comparing the market value of the coins held at each address with the price at which those coins were last moved. Balances whose cost basis sits above the prevailing price count as unrealized losses, and the larger that group becomes, the lower the profitable share of supply falls. Smoothing the series over 90 days removes short-lived swings, so a reading this depressed describes a cohort of holders accumulated across months rather than a single bad week of buyers. That breadth is what gives the indicator its weight in cycle analysis, because it reflects the position of the entire supply rather than the most recent entrants alone. Cryptollica's framing notes that the 2018 bear market, the sharp March 2020 sell-off and the 2022 decline each produced similar profitability troughs, and that several of those episodes overlapped with substantial recoveries in the periods that followed. The reading does not, by itself, measure selling: a holder can sit in an unrealized loss position for months without moving a single coin.

An unrealized loss becomes a market event only when holders act on it, which is why the second strand of the comparison turns to exchange balances. ETH held on centralized trading platforms has been declining, a shift that can reflect coins moving into personal wallets, staking arrangements or validator setups where they are not immediately available for sale. Less inventory on exchanges narrows the readily sellable supply, and falling balances are often read as a sign that selling pressure could ease. The same drift of coins off platforms is being watched across the wider altcoin market, where several large-cap assets have shown comparable patterns. For accumulation theses, the open question is whether coins leaving platforms reflect conviction or simply inventory awaiting a better exit.

The inference carries limits. Not every transfer away from an exchange reflects long-term holding: institutional custody movements, transfers between platforms and wallet reshuffling all register on the same gauge. The chart circulating with the comparison does not display exchange reserves directly, so any claim that reserves have reached fresh historical lows requires separate confirmation. History offers no guarantee either. Earlier cycles included stretches in which selling pressure persisted well after investor profitability had collapsed, and the analyst's comparison stops short of calling a bottom. A firmer assessment needs trading volume, capital inflows and holder behavior read alongside the profitability curve. Positioning from recent sessions points the same cautious way: BlackRock's ETHA led a $139.7 million daily outflow from Ethereum (ETH) ETFs, while dedicated treasuries kept buying, with Bitmine's Ethereum (ETH) holdings reaching 6.06 million tokens after an 8,573-token weekly purchase.

Ethereum Trades $45 Above Strongest Support

Live monitoring puts Ethereum at $2,263 at the time of writing, about 0.2% above where it traded when the profitability comparison was published, with the 24-hour change at -1.4%. A composite scoring model that grades where the indicators cluster places the strongest support at $2,218.06, scored 100 out of 100, with the nearest resistance at $2,324.04 at 95 out of 100. Momentum readings lean soft: the relative strength index sits at 33.69, the trend signal is bearish and the Fear and Greed Index reads 26 out of 100. Perpetual funding at 0.0038% stays near neutral, so leveraged positions are not paying a directional premium. What the levels add to the on-chain picture is distance: roughly $45 of room above the strongest support against about $61 to the first resistance, and the full Ethereum technical analysis breakdown tracks how those zones interact. Price is thus trading close to the same compressed zone that past cycles marked as bottoms, with the gap between the current profitability reading and a confirmed recovery still unmeasured.