Ethereum has had a turbulent start to the week and data suggests further declines are on the way. With Bitcoin losing momentum in recent hours and falling below the immediate support level, selling pressure on Ethereum is increasing. This downward trend is reinforced by several on-chain metrics, which now point to a potentially sharp 10% drop for Ethereum in the coming hours.
Ethereum Eyes for a 10% Drop
According to data from Coinglass, Ethereum liquidations have increased significantly, reaching more than $42.7 million in total. Of this amount, approximately $40 million resulted from the liquidation of long positions.
A bearish indicator is the increasing supply of ETH on exchanges. According to additional data from CryptoQuant, Ether balances on exchanges reached a four-week high of 15.8 million ETH on October 21. The net balance between inflows and outflows among centralized exchange portfolios shows a sharp increase between October 15 and October 20, when deposits to trading platforms began to rise.
Increasing ETH supply on exchanges suggests that investors are transferring their tokens from self-custodial wallets to exchanges, indicating an intention to sell.
Furthermore, Ethereum’s overall value has fallen since mid-June, as shown in the DefiLlama chart below.
TVL on the tier 1 network fell from a peak of $66 billion on June 3 to date, falling 57% to $42.3 billion on August 5 before rising to the current level of $48 billion. Additional data from DefiLlama indicates that Ethereum’s TVL has declined by more than 2% over the past 30 days, causing it to underperform other top layer 1 protocols such as Solana, which saw a 22% increase in TVL over the same period has seen.
The rising TVL in Solana reflects traders’ interest in the DeFi ecosystem and highlights Ethereum’s inability to attract new users due to its relatively higher transaction fees, especially for those looking to launch new projects.
This has strengthened the bearish dominance in Ethereum’s price chart, pushing the price towards a potential 10% decline.
What’s next for the ETH price?
The price of ether faced strong selling pressure as bears dominated the price around $2,800, indicating that the market had rejected the previous breakout. Selling pressure increased, pushing the price below the 200-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $2,552. At the time of writing, ETH price is trading at $2,517, down more than 4% in the last 24 hours.
There is slight support at the 50-day Simple Moving Average (SMA) at $2,487; However, if this level does not hold, the ETH/USDT pair could drop to $2,400 and then to $2,330.
Conversely, if the price reflects the 50-day SMA, it would indicate strong demand at lower price levels. In that case, the bulls could try to push the price towards $2,850, which will likely serve as a significant resistance barrier.
With the RSI level approaching oversold territory, we may soon see a recovery in the ETH price chart.