US spot ether exchange-traded funds lost roughly $160 million on October 7, extending a run of withdrawals to a sixth consecutive session, with BlackRock’s ETHA accounting for most of the exit. SoSoValue data, picked up by crypto.news and BlockchainReporter, showed the bleed arriving alongside a 1.9 percent drop in ether to about $2,561, its lowest stretch since the September rally broke.
The streak matters because it marks a clean break from the shape of September. Ether funds took in about $690 million in the week ended September 25, reversing previous outflows, and helped carry ether’s best quarter since 2021. Spot XRP funds, for comparison, added roughly $76 million in the same week. That bid has now run backwards six sessions, driven mainly by ETHA, the largest fund in the lineup and the product that led September’s buying.
Reading the streak
Flows of this size, roughly $25 million a day on average across the group, are not a rout on their own. Bitcoin funds posted $487 million in withdrawals the same day, their largest since June 25, so the pressure across crypto ETFs is shared rather than ether-specific. Collectively the complex is digesting a macro turn: the 10-year Treasury yield sits above 5.3 percent, just off a 24-year high of 5.36 percent, and Brent crude trades above $100 a barrel. Fund redemptions track that backdrop closely; when yields spiked in late September, the same funds bled before turning back to record weeks.
The distinction that matters for ether is the price level. Bitcoin holds a two-week range of $83,000 to $87,000 and closed Thursday near $82,700; ether has slipped below $2,600. Solana and XRP fell harder on the day, down 3.0 and 3.8 percent respectively, with SOL near $114.87. Ether is testing lower ground while its funds keep leaking, a weaker combination than bitcoin’s, where analyst consensus still describes consolidation rather than breakdown.
The treasury bid that shaped the rally
Coinciding with the outflow streak, the biggest corporate ether buyer told markets his own buying is close to done. Tom Lee of Bitmine Immersion Technologies, whose ether treasury reached 6.02 million coins, about 4.9 percent of total supply, with 5.07 million ETH staked, said the company will stop buying once it crosses 5 percent. Bitmine added 200,000 ETH in the two weeks through October 8 and sits roughly 100,000 coins from the cap, so at its current weekly pace the program ends within about a week.
| Item | Level |
|---|---|
| Bitmine ether treasury | 6.02 million ETH, about 4.9 percent of supply |
| Staked ETH held | 5.07 million |
| Chosen hard cap | 5 percent of total supply |
| Buys over the past two weeks | 200,000 ETH |
The 5 percent threshold, announced months ago, was the market’s way of pricing a large but finite buyer. When it hits, the steady weekly bid that has absorbed sell-side supply since mid-2025 disappears. Lee has framed the halt as discipline, not retreat: the company keeps its stake running and its treasury intact, it just stops adding. With fund flows now negative at the same time, both demand channels for ether thin within days of each other, and Bitmine’s stock, BMNR, slid a few tenths of a percent in Thursday pre-market alongside Coinbase and Circle.
Protocol events versus market flows
Against the outflows, the protocol side keeps advancing. Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is rehearsing on the Sepolia testnet with a tripled gas budget, targeting a capacity jump toward 200 million gas per block, roughly four times the current limit, ahead of mainnet deployment in the second half of 2026. The upgrade bundles parallel execution and ePBS, and client teams say the Sepolia rehearsal is the last large-scale test before the fork schedule is set.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, meanwhile, urged the community to plan gradual migrations away from old elliptic-curve wallets, arguing AI could expose those signatures before practical quantum computers arrive. Securitize’s launch of tokenized Apple, Nvidia and Tesla shares on Solana shows where the competition sits: front-end tokenization is moving, and chains are fighting over which rails carry it.
Those are long-run stories. The six-day outflow streak is the present one, and the fundamentals behind the chain have not moved in a week. Staking participation sits above 32 percent of supply, roughly 39.7 million ETH locked by about 1.24 million active validators, and stablecoin balances on Ethereum mainnet remain near $157 billion, about half the global total, per DefiLlama’s June snapshot, the latest apples-to-apples chain comparison. Mainnet DeFi TVL stands around $36.7 billion before layer 2s. Nothing in those numbers explains the redemptions; the price of holding any risk asset does.
What would flip the flows
Two things would. First, a Treasury and oil pullback, the same path that turned flows positive in late September when bitcoin briefly approached record highs and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq set records on Tuesday. Second, a rate surprise: traders give the Fed’s October meeting only a 16 to 19 percent chance of another hike after Governor Christopher Waller emphasized flexibility on pace, and if CME FedWatch stays there through the meeting, the December pricing, now near 80 percent, becomes the pivot traders watch instead.
Until then, ether heads into a seventh session of redemptions with its largest external buyer one weekly purchase from retirement. If the streak runs past a week while ETHA keeps leading withdrawals, $2,600 becomes the level the market tests with real money rather than analyst charts. If flows turn alongside a calm October Fed meeting, the September pattern, redemptions flipping to record inflows in a matter of days, is the obvious comparison to make.