$ETH This move is quite interesting. The price is hovering around $2,468, down just 0.18% over the past 24 hours, but the swing between the high and low points is nearly $100—suggesting the market is waiting for a clear directional signal. Today, the U.S. stock market is basically all about tech giants putting on a show. Marvell is getting hyped by institutions thanks to its data center business, Qualcomm is riding the AI hype, and even the healthcare insurance company Elevance is being analyzed as a “missed opportunity.” These things seem to have nothing to do with crypto at all, but they’re actually telling us the same thing: risk appetite for capital is being reshuffled. You need to understand that what U.S. tech stocks are playing right now is the “AI narrative” and the data center arms race—these are essentially the same logic chain as the infrastructure track in the crypto market. Marvell’s surge is driven by cloud providers aggressively spending to buy networking chips, and that’s fundamentally no different from how, in the ETH ecosystem, Layer 2 and cross-chain protocols burn money to grab bandwidth—both are bets that future computing demand will explode exponentially. So when these U.S. stocks are chased by funds, in theory, ETH—an “underlying computing token” for the smart contract platform—should also benefit. But the reality is that today ETH isn’t catching up; instead, it’s being pushed back around $2,533. That alone shows the issue: U.S. stocks are rising on individual stock expectations, while the crypto market currently lacks incremental capital flowing in. Put more plainly, today’s overall U.S. market sentiment is relatively optimistic, but look at ETH’s trading volume—only $1.02 billion. For a large-cap mainstream coin, that’s actually a bit sluggish. If it really were institutional money transmitting AI enthusiasm from the traditional markets, ETH’s volume should have expanded much more. So my view is that the market is in a “false correlation” phase—ETF capital and options market makers are controlling the pace, retail traders are watching from the sidelines, and that leads to ETH repeatedly grinding back and forth in the $2,438 to $2,533 range. Next, if those U.S. companies’ earnings reports can concretely deliver on AI revenue, ETH may be able to break above the prior high at $2,550 by riding that tailwind. But if the U.S. side is just trading concepts, then ETH will most likely keep frustratingly churning between $2,400 and $2,500. To put it simply, this isn’t that ETH’s fundamentals have broken down—it’s that it needs a macro catalyst to light the fire. See you in the comments.