The market’s bearish sentiment is further reflected by Peter Thiel’s recent exit from ETHzilla and a focus on technical price action over positive ecosystem developments like OpenAI’s new security benchmarks.
The price of Ethereum (ETH) might as well drop over 20%, to a low of US$1,500 (AU$2.2K) if the selloff continues into March.
That’s according to Max Shannon, a senior research associate at Bitwise. Shannon told DL News that a further monthly decline would put ETH on course for a drawdown streak approaching the seven-month slide seen between May and November 2018.
Ethereum as a Bitcoin Proxy
Shannon said Ethereum is largely trading as a high-volatility proxy for Bitcoin (BTC), moving in the same direction but with bigger swings.
“ETH continues to trade as a highly correlated, high-beta expression of BTC”, he said. In his view, Bitcoin’s weakness is pulling ETH lower, while traders are paying more attention to technical price action than to supportive fundamentals.
That has frustrated investors, he says, because Ethereum has several tailwinds on paper, including broader regulatory clarity, the launch of US spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds by multiple issuers, and the network’s central role in the roughly US$300 billion (AU$459 billion) stablecoin market.
ETH has also been cited publicly by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, but Shannon said those signals have not translated into stronger price performance. The investment manager recently seeded its proposed iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF with US$100K (AU$141K), as Crypto News Australia reported.
The broader pressure is showing up in equity-linked Ethereum treasury trades as well. A recent SEC filing published Thursday showed Peter Thiel sold his entire 7.5% stake in ETHZilla by the end of 2025 after the company pivoted from biotech to building an Ethereum treasury.
And despite the price weakness, development activity around Ethereum continues. For instance, OpenAI recently unveiled EVMbench, a smart contract security benchmark developed with crypto investment firm Paradigm, aimed at testing whether AI agents can identify, exploit, and remediate vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts.
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