Ethereum recorded its longest monthly losing streak since 2018.
Ethereum is approaching a milestone that few investors will welcome. It’s the longest streak of monthly losses since the cryptocurrency winter of 2018.
Since September 2025, ETH has recorded six consecutive months of decline, reducing its price by approximately 60% from a high of $4,953 in August 2025 to less than $2,000.
Loss streaks of this length are uncommon for a network simultaneously posting record trading activity, and this contrast is what makes the current phase stand out.
Update (March 5, 2026, 12:00 UTC): Ethereum continued to trade near the $2,000 level in early March while derivatives positioning and macro sentiment remained cautious, with options expiration at the end of February adding to near-term volatility. However, there are still no clear signs that ETF flows, stablecoin liquidity, or macro conditions have shifted decisively in favor of ETH.
As a result, the ETH downtrend is not the only problem at hand.
This run suggests that the market is re-evaluating Ethereum’s value amid strong network usage, but the mechanisms that once underpinned simple optimism about ETH have become more difficult to model.
This makes the current decline different from the 2018 crash. At the time, the broader cryptocurrency market was coming off its initial coin offering boom and much of the sector was still trying to demonstrate ongoing product-market fit.
Ethereum in 2026 will be a much more mature network. It has greater institutional relevance, greater on-chain economic activity, and more widespread use across tokenization, stablecoins, and layer 2 networks.
However, tokens tied to that system are still struggling to maintain their value.
Bitcoin acts as an index, while ETH acts like a high-beta transaction.
In the widespread cryptocurrency sell-off, Bitcoin is behaving more and more like a market benchmark, while ETH is trading like a high-beta representation of the sector.
This is important as liquidity thins and sentiment becomes defensive. ETH’s market depth is smaller than Bitcoin’s, positioning is often more leveraged, and marginal buyers are more sensitive to changes in macro risk appetite.
As the market de-risks, the structure could turn a broad cryptocurrency decline into a sharper move in Ethereum. This is especially true when derivatives rather than spot markets set the tone.
This is why ETH’s leverage space remains central to its story.
According to data from CoinGlass, ETH futures open interest has fallen 65% from its August 2025 peak of about $70 billion to about $24 billion at press time. This sharp decline explains the lack of risk in the market.
Nonetheless, this shows that the ETH price is shaping up in a market where forced positioning changes can dominate. Liquidation, hedging, and contract rolldowns can overwhelm discretionary purchases when traders take on risk.
In particular, the options market reflected the same tension.
Deribit analysis shows a sharp increase in short-term implied volatility and large negative skewness. This is a classic sign that the market is paying more for downside protection than upside exposure.
In practical terms, traders are not simply anticipating moves. They are paying a premium to prevent a move lower.
This helps explain the range of outcomes inherent in the market. With recent 7-day at-the-money implied volatility in the high-70% region, a one standard deviation band suggests a movement of about ±200 dollars per week, which is about $1,950 spot.
This expands to about $430 plus or minus over a month, or $740 plus or minus over a quarter.
This is not a price target. This is a snapshot of just how uncertain the next quarter is and how wide the possible paths the market has taken.
The flow picture did not help ETH bulls.
Derivatives markets explain how the price of ETH moves, but they do not fully explain why the pullback has not found a more durable buyer.
This focuses on capital formation, i.e. the slow-moving support that determines whether a decline attracts new funds or simply triggers a temporary bounce driven by short selling.
On that note, both signals for ETH remain weak.
The first is the story of ETFs.
Although daily figures vary, the multi-month trend for US-listed Ethereum ETFs has been net redemptions, with nine funds seeing outflows of $2.6 billion over the past four months.
This is important as a statement of institutional continuity rather than as a headline about immediate selling pressure.
If ETF flows are not structurally positive, the rally will need to be funded elsewhere. In practice, this often means relying more on the same complex of derivatives, which can magnify vulnerabilities.
At the same time, institutional acquisitions of digital asset finance companies have slowed significantly, with BitMine being the only major buyer in recent months.
In fact, another ETH-centric treasury company, ETHZilla, dumped its ETH holdings and converted to tokenized real-world assets.
The second is stablecoin supply, which is one of the clearest real-time proxies for cryptocurrency purchasing power.
Over the past few months, major stablecoins have experienced significant slowdowns, presenting challenging prospects for a broader market recovery.
For context, Tether’s USDT market cap has fallen for two consecutive months, indicating that new liquidity pools have not expanded in the sector. This has not happened, especially after the collapse of Terra’s USDT algorithmic stablecoin in 2022.
This is important for Ethereum because its strongest upward phases tend to coincide with expansions in on-chain purchasing power.
When the stablecoin base is flat, price action can deteriorate into rotational and leverage-driven movements rather than sustained spot accumulation.
In such an environment, a rebound may occur, but it will be difficult to become self-reliant.
Ethereum is expanding, but this complicates its value story.
The current downward trend is different from 2018 because Ethereum’s network is more complex and an expansion roadmap is available.
Ethereum’s seven-day moving average of daily transactions hit a new high of about 2.9 million in early February, according to data from CryptoQuant.
Drivers for this milestone include the continued growth of on-chain use cases, such as real-world asset tokenization, and the shift to cheaper executions, resulting in lower transaction costs for users. In general, low fees and high throughput favor adoption.
However, the expansion process has complicated the valuation framework that many investors relied on following the merger.
The “ultrasonic currency” narrative, reinforced by EIP-1559 and the shift to proof-of-stake, focuses on fee drains as a potential path to shrinking supply.
This mechanism still works during periods of high fee pressure, when blockspace demand increases, fees surge, burns increase, and ETH can turn into net deflation.
But the important thing is that this path has become a conditional rather than automatic.
As demand normalizes or activity migrates to a cheaper execution environment, attrition pressure drops. The post-Dencun environment presents a compromise. Blob data makes rollups less expensive to operate, lowering Layer 2 rates and expanding capacity.
For ETH holders, this means that the base layer may not extract the same fee revenue under normal conditions.
Data from Ultrasound.money shows periods when ETH issuance exceeds consumption.
This always undermines simplified versions of the deflation story and forces a more nuanced debate about how Ethereum will capture value in a future where rollups dominate.
Networks can grow with payment layers, but it becomes more difficult to model direct monetary cases for tokens using analogies that investors understand, such as buybacks or dividends.
Six consecutive months of losses is useful in this context because it suggests that the market is reassessing the link between ecosystem growth and token value at a time when the macro situation is providing limited support.
How can we end the streak?
Ethereum’s next steps will likely fall into one of three broad paths:
The first is the surrender-reset outcome. If March 2026 ends in a downward trend, the psychological burden will increase as the streak continues to match the 2018 record.
In this scenario, ETF redemptions continue, stablecoin supply remains stagnant, and option skewness remains negative, indicating hedging demand remains dominant.
The price then tends to test the lower edge of the implied volatility cone. This is not because Ethereum is broken, but because the market wants a bigger discount before taking risks again.
The second is long-term cutting and foundation building. This is a less dramatic but perhaps more realistic outcome. Leverage continues to bleed and volatility, while still high, is starting to stabilize and ETH trades in a broad range while macro data remains mixed.
Ethereum could still show healthier application revenue and stronger layer 2 activity in that world. The difference is that the price does not compensate immediately because it is waiting for better liquidity conditions.
The third is liquidity conversion. A more sustained rally for ETH will likely require a combination of macro tailwinds, easing risk aversion pressures, stabilizing ETF flows, and new growth in stablecoin purchasing power.
If that happens, the market may start to look at Ethereum’s expansion story differently. Instead of focusing on fee compression, investors could place more weight on Ethereum as a settlement layer for a broader economic surface area.
In such a framework, the valuation argument moves from burn alone toward indispensability.
The main takeaway is that Ethereum is not simply repeating 2018. Markets are testing new narratives under stress.
Ethereum is becoming more and more useful, but during quiet periods, making money through fees isn’t as clear as many investors thought.
These tensions, combined with macro risk appetite and the quality of capital flowing through ETFs, stablecoins and derivatives, will determine whether this streak ends as a painful footnote or the beginning of a longer period of rising interest rates.
Recent developments (March 5, 2026, 12:00 UTC)
- Early March 2026: Ethereum entered March after a prolonged string of monthly losses dating back to September 2025, reinforcing the risk that a seventh straight decline could set a new record if March also ends on a down note.
- March 2026: Market commentary points to a mixed picture, with long-term holders appearing reluctant to sell, while broader macro and derivatives positioning keeps short-term sentiment vulnerable, with ETH trading just above the $1,900-$2,000 area as it enters March.
Taken together, the latest data reinforces the central tension of the article. Although Ethereum’s network activity and structural role in the cryptocurrency economy continues to expand, price discovery remains dominated by macro risk appetite, derivatives positioning, and the pace of new liquidity flowing into the ecosystem.
