Written by: Frank, PANews
When the price of Ethereum rebounded from a low of $1,385 to $2,700, the 97.7% increase was behind the capital split of ice and fire. Institutional funds remained cautious in the ETF market, but the holdings of derivative contracts hit a historical peak of $32.2 billion. After a long period of depression, the market hopes to prove that Ethereum is still a value trough through this rebound, and the Pectra upgrade seems to provide evidence for this narrative. PANews attempts to outline the current true state of Ethereum through a comprehensive interpretation of Ethereum data. An Ethereum that is undergoing value reconstruction is gradually emerging.
Market and funds: ETF caution and contract enthusiasm
As of May 18, the total net asset value of the US ETH ETF reached $8.97 billion. It accounts for 2.89% of the total market value of Ethereum. Compared with the 5.95% of Bitcoin ETF, this proportion is still low. Overall, Bitcoin seems to be more popular in the ETF market.
In addition, from February to the end of April, the funds of Ethereum ETF were mostly in outflow. It was not until April 21 that it began to flow back again, but the overall return data was not obvious. The net inflow of Ethereum ETF in April was about 66.25 million US dollars, and the net inflow so far in May was about 30 million US dollars.
According to Glassnode data, it was also at the end of April that Ethereum's "Net Unrealized Profit/Loss" (NUPL) value reversed to a positive number again. Before that, between April 1 and 22, the NUPL value was always negative. During this period, the price of Ethereum fell below $1,800, with the lowest reaching $1,385. That is to say, when the price of Ethereum fell below $1,800, the overall holding addresses were basically in a loss state. However, this negative data sometimes also indicates a signal of the market bottom, because the selling pressure is close to exhaustion at this stage. However, as of May 17, the NUPL value reached a maximum of 0.328. Judging from the range of values, it is still in the early stage of the bull market or the recovery period, and has not yet reached the extremely optimistic stage.
Another interesting data is that the number of addresses with a balance greater than 1 on the Ethereum chain has fallen as the price rebounded, while in the previous price decline, this data has been rising, indicating that many investors still choose to buy the bottom in the downward stage. When the price rose to $1,800, some addresses chose to profit and exit. However, this proportion did not drop very high, only about one thousandth. As the price rebounded, the current percentage of profitable addresses in Ethereum has reached 60%.
Although the recent price rebound is still far from the historical high, the contract position has reached a historical high recently. On May 14, the Ethereum contract position reached 32.249 billion US dollars, which is almost the highest contract position in history. The last time the contract volume reached this value was in January-February 2025, when the price of Ethereum fluctuated between 3,000 and 3,800 US dollars. It can be seen that the market is still very keen to bet on Ethereum.
In general, looking at the market and capital data, Ethereum began to usher in positive capital inflows in the price bottom range at the end of April, and then the price also ushered in a sharp rise, with the highest increase reaching 97.7%, nearly doubling. However, judging from the inflow of funds, especially the capital flow of ETFs, the proportion of traditional institutional funds is still not high.
TVL rebounded, but low Gas failed to activate transaction volume
From the perspective of on-chain activity, the change in Ethereum active addresses is not obvious, and the current value is still fluctuating between 400,000 and 600,000 per day. This fluctuation pattern has been maintained for more than 1 year, but the recent fluctuation curve has broken through the 600,000 range.
Another important data TVL has a more obvious trend of change. TVL in US dollars has rebounded since April 22, rising from around US$4.5 billion to around US$64.6 billion. However, considering the sharp rise in Ethereum prices at this stage, this change may not be able to see the real situation on the chain. After switching the ETH amount, it can be seen that since April 9, the ETH pledge amount on the Ethereum chain has dropped significantly, from a high of 30.26 million to a low of 24 million, a drop of 20%.
The reason for this phenomenon may be that during the rapid rise in Ethereum prices, some funds chose to take profits or avoid uncompensated losses, resulting in a reduction in the amount of tokens.
As for the changes in Gas, as of May 16, 2025, the average Gas price of Ethereum was 3.572 Gwei, a sharp drop of 21.57% from the previous day, and a sharp drop of 51.76% from last year. The Gas fee has generally shown a downward trend in the past 30 days. It briefly soared to 10.61 Gwei on May 8, but has been maintained below 8Gwei recently, and was as low as 1.6Gwei on May 3. This change is related to EIP-7691 in the Pectra upgrade, which aims to reduce L2 fees by expanding blob space.
However, the extremely low Gas fee does not seem to have stimulated the increase in on-chain transactions. In terms of the number of daily transactionsNo obvious changes have been seen
DEX transactions and asset structure: stablecoin dominance and ecological transformation
According to the on-chain staking data, from April 15 to May 5, Ethereum's staking volume has always been in a net outflow state. In particular, Coinbase's staking outflow in the past 6 months is 30%. Currently, the validator with the most staking is still Lido, with a staking volume of 9.11 million.
In terms of on-chain DEX trading volume, the Ethereum mainnet has clearly entered an active period after entering 2025. The activity of this cycle is significantly higher than the performance in 2024, close to the peak period from 2021 to 2022. However, judging from the revenue data, the recent increase in trading activity mainly comes from stablecoin-related transactions. USDT has generated $568 million in fees on Ethereum in the past 30 days. As of May 18, Ethereum is still the public chain with the largest issuance of stablecoins, accounting for more than 50%, with a total issuance of $127.3 billion, twice the Ethereum DeFi TVL.
Analysis of the types of funds on the Ethereum chain shows that nearly half of the transactions on the Ethereum chain are completed by stablecoin and ETH transfers. And the proportion of stablecoin transactions is obviously increasing, while the proportion of DeFi and ERC-20 token transactions is actually still declining. This also shows that Ethereum is still transforming into the role of an asset value storage center on the chain, while the development of MEME and application categories seems to be restricted. From this point of view, Ethereum's strategy of trying to boost activity by reducing handling fees and increasing transaction speed may be difficult to work.
In addition, although the average single transfer amount on Ethereum has also declined recently, it is still between thousands of dollars and $10,000. This data is far ahead of all public chains, and Solana's data is generally only tens of dollars. This shows that Ethereum is an absolute exclusive chain for big players.
In general, the recent rebound in Ethereum prices is more like the result of the pain of the transition period. On the one hand, the Ethereum ecosystem has been working hard to optimize performance through continuous technical updates and upgrades, but this effort seems to have failed. On the other hand, it is a place where large-scale funds and stablecoin transactions are concentrated, and large investors seem to be very satisfied with the current quiet state of Ethereum on the chain.
Therefore, the rise and fall of a single indicator can no longer simply define the "good" and "bad" of Ethereum. The market may need to go beyond the previous growth narrative and re-examine and understand the core role and long-term value of Ethereum in the multi-chain landscape. Instead of being obsessed with judging whether it is "rising" or "declining", it is better to realize that after all the noise and iterations, a more mature and "stable" Ethereum
