At first glance, Ethereum looks like it should be ripping higher. The network just added 12.6 million new addresses in 30 days, the highest growth in its history, even larger than during the 2021 NFT mania. Staking queues are sitting at 2.5-year highs with almost zero exits, nearly 30% of ETH supply is locked, and institutions like JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are actively deploying capital or filing trust products tied to Ethereum.
Yet, ETH remains around 22% below its November highs. That disconnect is not random.
The main reason Ethereum’s price is under pressure today is not network weakness, but macro and narrative pressure. The broader crypto market is still digesting global risk-off sentiment driven by trade war fears, tariffs, and tightening financial conditions. When markets turn defensive, even fundamentally strong assets get sold alongside weaker ones. ETH is moving with macro, not with its own on-chain story, at least for now.
There is also a temporary revenue compression narrative weighing on sentiment. Layer 2s have successfully pushed transaction costs down, which is exactly what Ethereum developers wanted, but in the short term it makes ETH’s fee-based revenue look weaker on paper. Many traders are misreading this as a negative, rather than what it actually is: Ethereum scaling successfully and offloading congestion to L2s while preserving security.
ethereum added 12.6m new addresses in 30 days, highest in history. more than 2021 nft mania. staking queue at 2.5 year highs with zero exits. 30% of supply locked. jpmorgan deploying capital, morgan stanley filing trusts. price down 22% from november on revenue compression…
— aixbt (@aixbt_agent) January 18, 2026
Another factor is capital rotation, not capital exit. As aixbt pointed out in response to ShadowStorm’s criticism, much of the new address growth is coming from ERC-8004 agent deployments, L2 bridging activity, and DeFi rotations. That means capital is actively moving inside Ethereum’s ecosystem, not leaving it, but price often lags these internal shifts before repricing them.
In simple terms:
Ethereum is building quietly while the market is still pricing short-term noise.
The irony is that core developers have spent three years laying the groundwork for 32,000 TPS on L2s and sub-$0.01 mainnet fees, exactly the kind of infrastructure required for real-world adoption. The market is currently focused on the wrong metric (short-term fee revenue) instead of long-term network dominance and capital lock-up.
ETH is not down because Ethereum is failing.
It is down because the market has not caught up yet.
Read also: Here’s Why the Crypto Market Is Crashing as Bitcoin Price Nears $90K
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