First Coin

Ethereum slides below $2,400 as market-wide crypto crash hits Saturday

On Saturday, the whole cryptocurrency market faced a sharp drop. Among the biggest coins, Ethereum was one of the worst performers over both the last day and the past week. In just a few hours, the price of Ethereum fell below $2,400 for the first time since July 2 this year. This move means the price dropped more than 10% in the last 24 hours and about 18% in the last seven days.

To help you follow what happened, here are some quick notes. The chart of the price often uses a symbol like ETHUSD. The description here is about the U.S. dollar price of Ethereum. On a recent day, Ethereum managed to rise above $3,000 briefly. It even touched $3,070, which some traders saw as a return to an important round number that many investors watch. This rise happened before the first Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting of the year. The FOMC is a group inside the U.S. central bank that decides interest rate policy.

Right after that brief lift, Ethereum started a sharp fall. Many traders think the fall got worse after the Fed signaled it would pause cutting interest rates. In other words, the central bank did not lower rates as quickly as some had hoped. This can change how much money people want to put into riskier assets like cryptocurrencies.

Geopolitical tension in the Middle East added to the selling pressure on Thursday. The whole crypto market, including Ethereum, fell further and traded below $2,800. Friday was calmer for traditional markets, but digital assets that traders buy and sell around the clock still faced selling pressure. The environment remained unsettled and investors were cautious.

Analysts report that many Ethereum tokens moved from private wallets to exchanges during the recent drop. A trader named Ali Martinez noted that more than 70,000 ETH moved onto trading platforms in the last three days. When coins are moved to exchanges, they are often ready to be sold, which can push prices lower. Traders use exchanges to buy and sell quickly.

Another trader, Merlijn The Trader, highlighted that ETH moved below a key support level around $2,700. A support level is a price point where many buyers have shown interest in the past. If the price falls below that point, some traders worry the price could fall even more. They call this situation a “make-it-or-break-it” moment because it could determine whether the price recovers or declines further.

On a more hopeful note, another analyst, known as CW, said that Ethereum holders who own a lot of Ethereum — often called whales — have been buying more ETH than Bitcoin in the last day. That is, big buyers have been accumulating ETH even as prices fell. In the crypto world, whales can move the market with their large purchases or sales.

There is also a view that ordinary retail investors, or regular people who buy small amounts, were seeing losses in this period while whales were building positions at lower prices. Some traders noted that whales were taking advantage of the price decline to open new or bigger positions in both short (betting prices will fall) and long (betting prices will rise) arrangements.

In the last 10 hours, large buyers were active on major futures platforms. Data show that whales purchased about $2.97 billion of ETH futures on Binance Futures and about $2.42 billion on OKX Futures. Futures are financial contracts that let traders speculate on price movements without owning the underlying asset. These numbers illustrate how big players are betting on where Ethereum’s price will go next.

Ethereum’s sell-off has hit traders who use leverage hard. Leverage lets traders borrow money to place larger bets. This can lead to big profits but also big losses if prices move against them. A data tracker named CoinGlass shows that in the last 24 hours more than $550 million in Ethereum long positions were liquidated. A liquidation means a trader’s loan or position was closed automatically because the price moved too far against them. In the same period, liquidations on Bitcoin were about $475 million. This shows Ethereum longs faced more forced closings than Bitcoin longs during this cooldown in prices.

What this means for new readers: Ethereum is a kind of digital money that also lets people build and run programs on a public computer network. It is part of a system that uses smart contracts. A smart contract is a program that can automatically carry out terms of an agreement when certain conditions are met. The idea is to make agreements run without a middleman, like a bank or lawyer, using technology instead. For readers who want a quick background, the term The Merge refers to a major upgrade that changed how Ethereum reaches consensus. This upgrade moved away from a system that used lots of electricity and toward a newer method that uses less energy. You can learn more about it in the linked pages on Wikipedia.

In simple terms, today’s price action shows a mix of bad news and big bets. The market-wide crash is hurting many traders, especially those who used a lot of borrowed money. It also shows how quickly sentiment in crypto can change when big financial events, like the actions of the U.S. Federal Reserve, as well as world events, interact with a market that trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For readers who want to understand the broader context, here are quick definitions of some terms used in this report, with links to easy explanations:

In short, Ethereum remains under pressure as investors react to macroeconomic signals, geopolitical events, and the ongoing debate about how to price risk in a market that never closes. While some big buyers are accumulating ETH at lower prices, others are reducing risk in hopes of preserving capital. The path forward will depend on a mix of policy decisions, world events, and how investors judge the risk and reward of owning or trading Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.