Crypto
Ether Touched $2,282 on Saturday After a Week of ETF Outflows and a Delayed Upgrade. Bitcoin Funds Took In $301 Million
Ether fell to $2,282.46 on Binance on Saturday afternoon, its lowest since at least September, before recovering to about $2,350. US spot ether ETFs lost about $220.7 million last week while bitcoin funds took in $301.2 million, according to Farside data. On Thursday Ethereum's developers also pulled the Glamsterdam upgrade from its October 26 testnet date after a security firm flagged a gas-pricing risk.
The second-largest cryptocurrency has spent October doing worse than the largest. Ether was at about $2,726 on October 5 and closed Friday, October 23, at $2,387.60, a fall of about 12%, while bitcoin lost about 6% over the same period. On Saturday the gap widened again. Between 14:00 and 15:15 UTC ether fell 3.6% on Binance, from $2,368 to $2,282.46, its lowest price since at least the start of September, on $139.5 million of volume in the 15:00 hour, about 21 times the hour before; bitcoin fell 1.2% to $79,220 in the same half-hour. No single item of news was reported as the cause. By midnight ether had recovered to $2,358.82, and on Sunday morning it traded near $2,350.
The fund flows explain more of the month than the weekend does. According to Farside Investors data compiled by NewsBTC, US spot bitcoin ETFs took in about $1.07 billion from Monday to Wednesday last week and then lost $635.6 million on Thursday and $137.9 million on Friday, $110.3 million of it from BlackRock's IBIT, for a provisional weekly inflow of about $301.2 million. The ether funds had a worse week with no such cushion: a net outflow of about $220.7 million, including $110.6 million on Thursday, against a $4.4 million inflow on Friday. Investors who want crypto exposure through a regulated fund have, on the week, still been buying bitcoin and selling ether.
The network itself gave traders one less reason to wait. Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next upgrade, had been due to activate on the Hoodi test network on Monday, October 26, at 17:42:48 UTC, after running on the Sepolia testnet since October 6. On the All Core Developers call of Thursday, October 22, developers removed that date, together with a planned increase in Hoodi's gas limit to 200 million, after the security firm ChainSecurity showed that two of the upgrade's proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, could change how some existing contracts behave when they run short of gas; under the new pricing, creating a storage slot could cost up to 110,020 gas instead of 22,100, CoinDesk reported. ChainSecurity said it had not shown that any major live protocol was exploitable, and no new Hoodi date was set. A revised schedule was expected after Devcon in early November.
None of this touches ether holders directly. Mainnet had no Glamsterdam date to delay, and the change matters mainly to node operators, who had to install client releases that drop the October 26 activation. Its market effect is about timing: an upgrade that some had hoped would reach mainnet before the end of the year now has no testnet date, let alone a mainnet one, in a month when the asset was already short of buyers.
The week ahead offers several tests at once. The Federal Reserve decides on Wednesday, with futures pricing a hold and a likely December increase; Coinbase and Strategy report on Thursday after the close; and the monthly crypto options expiry falls on Friday, October 30. Saturday's low at $2,282 was retested at $2,294.84 and held. Whether it holds a third time will say more about ether's direction than the weekend did.