Even after Ethereum celebrated its entry into Wall Street, ETH’s price has failed to keep pace with rival cryptocurrencies this cycle.

As crypto markets tumbled on Sunday, the ETH to BTC exchange rate hit a yearly low of 0.041, according to TradingView data. Although digital assets including ETH have steadily recovered since then, the ratio remains at 0.043 at the time of writing.

Many can’t help but find this trend unusual. During bull runs, altcoins often outperform Bitcoin as capital spills over from the leading digital asset to riskier small-cap assets. In fact, this has proven to be true during Bitcoin’s first quarter rally against altcoins like Solana and copy coins like PEPE and WIF. It’s just that this is not the case with ETH.

“This shift challenges the long-held belief that network effects alone can sustain Ethereum’s dominance,” financial analyst Wesley Kress wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Ethereum has traded very poorly this cycle and I think people are realizing this is not the future.”

However, several other analysts believe that this pessimistic view is greatly exaggerated. They say that time will be Ethereum’s best friend, especially if the new Ethereum spot ETF has time to delve into its findings.

“There’s so much hype about the potential of what this ETF will do to prices right away — right now, there’s so much fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD),” crypto influencer Crypto Kaleo said Thursday. He noted that the Ethereum ETF has been live for 12 days, which is the exact length of time it took BTC to bottom out and rebound after its respective ETF debut in January.

In theory, the introduction of an ETF is bullish news for the ETH price as it enables various institutions to purchase Ethereum at times when they might otherwise be prohibited by regulation.

However, according to Jonathan Beale, chief investment officer at FarsideUK, an ETF may not bring the same success to Ethereum as it has to Bitcoin.

“Most of the success will be driven by individuals and entities moving their existing (Ethereum Trust) holdings into the ETF,” Beal told Decrypt. He said Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust could be more problematic than Bitcoin’s because investors would need to worry about paying capital gains taxes on the sale of their Ethereum Trust shares.

“At the same time, Ethereum investors are not as loyal as Bitcoin investors,” he added. “Ethereum investors are always looking for the latest thing and the latest technology.”

Throughout the year, Solana has outperformed Ethereum on key metrics related to network activity. In late July, Solana’s total transaction fees surpassed Ethereum’s for the first time.

Several market-related on-chain metrics also show that investor interest in ETH is wavering, second only to BTC. According to CryptoQuant, Bitcoin’s “realized capitalization” (a measure of new investor inflows into BTC) has increased by $187 billion so far this year, compared to ETH’s $127 billion.

“Bitcoin has outperformed Ethereum on some of the network’s fundamental metrics,” Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told Decrypt. “For example, as the ETH/BTC price ratio has fallen, the ratio of the number of transactions in the Ethereum network to the number of transactions in the Bitcoin network has also fallen.”



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