One $ETH now buys you 0.029 BTC.

Lowest since July — and Tuesday's CPI decides whether it breaks above 0.03 or slides back toward the June low.

This is the number that matters. Not ETH's dollar price. The ratio.

On 1 November it touched 0.0289. On 4 November it spiked above 0.0305 — then got rejected and faded straight back. The market has tested this same shelf three times this year. Each test, the same question: floor or ledge?

The two sides of this market are doing the exact opposite things.

Institutions are selling. US spot ETH ETFs just logged a sixth straight week of outflows — $365 million last week, a record $1.61 billion in October. Bitcoin ETFs bled even harder: $1.28 billion out in a week, the worst since June.

But on-chain, the whales are buying. Large wallets scooped up over $42 million of ETH in the past week — one whale grabbed 8,773 ETH at $2,245, and an ICO-era holder who bought a million ETH in 2015 just added 2,221 more. The staking queue is jammed too: over a million ETH waiting to lock up, almost nobody lining up to leave. 36% of all ETH is now staked.

So who do you believe — the ETF flows or the wallets?

The majors aren't helping. $SOL is the week's laggard at $89, down almost 7% and sitting right on $88 support. BNB is the most resilient major, holding $696. XRP is the weakest at $1.16. No rotation yet — the altseason index is stuck at 37 and Bitcoin dominance is still near 59%. Until ETH leads, nothing else moves.

History says this ratio is a mean-reversion machine — but only with a catalyst. The last two times it was this depressed, it snapped back violently: in April 2025 it bounced 38% in a single week, and ETH went on to hit nearly $4,950 by August. In 2019, the same setup preceded a five-fold recovery.

But — and this is the honest part — cheap has kept getting cheaper for four years. In 2022 everyone called the ETH bottom early, and the ratio still halved from there. A low ratio is a setup, not a guarantee.

Tuesday is the trigger. CPI lands at 8:30am ET, consensus +0.3% headline and +0.2% core. The asymmetry: the last hot print in September hit ETH twice as hard as Bitcoin (-6.5% vs -3.6%). A soft core number cracks the December hike odds — currently near 77% — and that's the fuel for a breakout. A hot one, and $2,200 is the first line in the sand.

Watch these levels. On $ETH: $2,200 is the floor defended twice this week; $2,385 is the first resistance, then $2,434. On $BTC: $74,790 is the support; $78,740 is the first resistance overhead. On the ratio: 0.0287 is the shelf — lose it and the June low of 0.0258 is in play; reclaim 0.03 and, as van de Poppe put it, ETH starts outperforming and the altcoins follow.

Bargain or trap? Tuesday answers it.

Not financial advice. DYOR.