Ethereum delivered a 26% surge this week to $2.5K, effectively reversing all Q2 losses after dipping to $1.5K in June. The altcoin has gained 29% over the past week and currently trades at $2,422, outrunning Bitcoin two-to-one on $2.9 billion of liquidations - the largest such event since tracking began in 2021. The move takes ETH to its strongest level since May and delivers a seven-day advance of roughly 20% - the largest among the majors by a wide margin. Two sessions ago, Ethereum sat near $1,930 before spending August grinding between $1,850 and $1,900 with the entire market treating it as dead money. The catalyst stack fired in sequence, with the Treasury announcing Wednesday it is increasing liquidity support buyback operations from $2 billion to at least $4 billion effective September 9 through November 4, while the 30-year yield collapsed from a nineteen-year high of 5.337% to 5.184%.
Whale profit-taking has intensified after Ethereum's two-day rally exceeding 20%, with large holders placing fresh selling pressure against still-strong market demand. According to Lookonchain, 7 Siblings sold 14,000 ETH worth $32.85 million at an average price of $2,346, while another whale sold 11,252 stETH worth $26.5 million and 1,824 ETH worth $4.26 million. The transactions coincided with ETH's sharp rise, with profit-taking being a probable reason for the selling by large holders. However, the distribution came as ETH was still trading close to the whales' average selling points, raising the significance of demand at $2,346, with sellers converting massive amounts of their inventory into stablecoins. Latest data from Santiment reveals that large whale wallets holding over 1000 ETH trimmed off 1.7M coins in the last three months, with their overall holdings dropping from 58.64M ETH to 56.91M ETH between May and August, representing a 2.9% fall.
Despite whale selling pressure, retail investors have shown remarkable accumulation during Ethereum's Q2 drawdown. According to Santiment, the wallet category holding 1 to 10 ETH surged to over 4.5% of the circulating supply over the same period, suggesting that retail was actively accumulating during the Q2 decline. Staking demand has been crucial in easing the sell-off driven by the U.S Spot ETH ETF in Q2, with staked ETH jumping from 39M coins to a record 42.3M coins, or a 35% staking ratio. Since July, the Spot ETH ETF complex has become a net buyer, hauling in record inflows of over 34K ETH this week alone. The 90-day Spot Taker CVD remained taker-buy dominant, indicating more buying activity than selling activity in the market, with ETH recording approximately $40.43 million in negative Spot Netflows as of the time of writing.
The battle between demand and supply has been brought directly to $2,378, the significant resistance zone for Ethereum. ETH had rallied from $1,945 prior to hitting around $2,353 and testing the broken supply level. Importantly, buyers entered that zone with strong directional conditions rather than approaching it through weak participation. The +DI has rallied to 51.69 while the -DI has fallen drastically to just 7.17, with the ADX currently at 30.19, indicating strong momentum in the direction of the trend. Those readings favor buyers as ETH tests an area that previously capped advances during the April and May sessions. $2,377.89 represented the immediate threshold separating the rally from a cleaner technical expansion, with a continuation break potentially creating a larger opportunity to the major $2,795.75 resistance level. Options market data shows sophisticated players positioning for continued recovery, with calls (bullish bets) eyeing $2,500 for end-of-August expiry and bullish bets concentrated at $2,900 and $3,000 for September expiries.
As reported by Gemini AI, the Platåberget testnet for Glamsterdam anchors the price prediction through its introduction of block-level access lists via EIP-7928 and proposer-builder separation via EIP-7732. These upgrades are expected to drastically expand Layer-1 gas throughput toward the 200 million gas figure. The Hegota upgrade has confirmed FOCIL through EIP-7805, while native account abstraction is under evaluation as EIP-8141, both feeding stateless validation via Verkle trees. The practical result is anticipated to be cheaper node hardware, framed as the path to institutional-grade network efficiency. The twice-yearly hard-fork cadence converts network upgrades from rare mega-releases into steady increments, removing binary event risk and creating a more predictable development timeline. Gemini AI predicts that EIP-7928 brings parallel execution to the network, scaling throughput toward 10,000 TPS, while EIP-7904 handles cost through gas repricing, slicing Layer-1 fees by roughly 78.6%. The bear case is a timing failure with further technical delays pushing protocol execution past Q4 2026, which would trigger prolonged consolidation and risk a breakdown below $2,100 support toward a bear target of $1,850.
