Ethereum Price Forecast - ETH-USD Stalls at $3,100 While $114.7M ETF Inflows Clash With Heavy Outflows

Ethereum (ETH-USD) near $3,100: weak structure, strong underlying demand

Ethereum (ETH-USD) trades around $3,100–$3,200, down roughly 2–3% on the day but still about 6–8% higher over the last week and modestly higher over the month. Bitcoin holds just under $90,000, after spot BTC ETFs saw roughly $480 million in outflows over two sessions, while XRP gives back part of a 17% weekly move and Dogecoin keeps about a 22% weekly gain.
The macro tape remains supportive. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield trades close to 4.14%, and softer U.S. employment data has pushed the market toward additional Fed cuts later in 2026. That backdrop helps risk assets, but current ETH-USD behavior is driven more by flows and technical structure than by macro headlines.

Market structure and resistance band for ETH-USD

On the daily chart, ETH-USD sits below every major moving average. The 20-day EMA is near $3,078, the 50-day EMA around $3,128, the 100-day EMA close to $3,302, and the 200-day EMA roughly $3,349. Together they form a tight resistance cluster above spot that price has tested several times since mid-December and failed to clear. That failure sequence marks the current phase as a corrective rebound under a ceiling, not a clean upside trend.
Price trades in the lower half of the Bollinger Bands, which matches a market under pressure rather than one starting a momentum expansion. Daily RSI sits around neutral, not confirming a fresh uptrend, while MACD has rolled over from earlier strength and is compressing after the early-January bounce. The higher-timeframe message is simple: sellers no longer dominate outright, but buyers have not regained control as long as ETH-USD remains pinned under the EMA wall.

Short-term descending channel keeps sellers in control

On intraday views such as the 30-minute chart, ETH-USD trades inside a down-sloping channel defined by lower highs and lower lows. Each approach to the upper boundary has attracted supply and forced price back toward the middle or lower part of the channel.
Short-term RSI spends most of the time below 45, showing weak buying conviction. MACD remains negative, with only shallow histogram recoveries that fade once ETH-USD touches channel resistance. Every recovery toward $3,150–$3,200 has been sold rather than chased, so short-term control still sits with the sellers until the descending channel is broken decisively.

Exchange flows: 129,100 ETH leaves CEXs while rallies get sold

Spot flows paint a mixed but important picture. On January 8, Ethereum saw around $46.2 million in net spot outflows, continuing a pattern where price pushes are not backed by heavy new spot buying. Rallies are being used to reduce exposure rather than to build it. At the same time, centralized exchanges registered a net outflow of 129,100 ETH on January 6, with Binance alone seeing more than 123,200 ETH withdrawn, while Bybit and OKX also posted outflows and Gate recorded a roughly 5,700 ETH inflow.
Heavy outflows from exchanges usually signal coins moving into self-custody or long-term storage and therefore lower immediate sell pressure. The current pattern shows reduced liquid supply but also a lack of aggressive spot accumulation on strength, which is why price keeps stalling under resistance. Supply is being drained, but demand is still selective.

Institutional demand: ETFs restart inflows and whales rotate into ETH-USD

On the institutional side, Ethereum ETF flows have turned positive again. On January 6, 2025, spot ETH ETFs took in about $114.7 million in net inflows. BlackRock’s ETHA alone added roughly $198.8 million, marking the third straight inflow day after $174.5 million on January 2 and $168 million on January 5. Even after that streak, ETH ETFs still trade about 18% below their October peaks, largely because ETH-USD sold off in late 2025.
Whale behavior lines up with that rotation. World Liberty Financial (WLFI) withdrew around 162.69 WBTC from Aave, worth about $15 million, and immediately swapped 27.12 WBTC (around $2.5 million) into 770.6 ETH. That is a deliberate shift from Bitcoin exposure into ETH-USD, not a passive rebalance. The move reflects a preference for Ethereum’s role across DeFi, staking and layer-2 ecosystems rather than a pure store-of-value profile.

BitMine treasury strategy: 4.14 million ETH and a 5% supply target

The most aggressive balance-sheet bet on ETH-USD comes from BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR). In the last week of 2025, BitMine bought 32,977 ETH, around $104 million, during a period when overall equity and crypto activity was subdued. That purchase lifted its holdings to 4.14 million ETH, worth roughly $13 billion, representing around 3.4% of the circulating ETH supply. BitMine’s explicit goal is to control 5% of circulating ETH, which implies another ~1.9 million ETH of potential future accumulation.
Alongside that Ethereum stash, BitMine holds about $915 million in cash and 192 BTC worth close to $18 million, so the treasury is overwhelmingly geared to ETH-USD rather than BTC-USD. That positioning makes BitMine the largest Ethereum treasury firm and the second-largest public crypto treasury overall, behind the leading Bitcoin treasury company with approximately $63 billion in BTC holdings.
Company chairman Tom Lee has mapped an ultra-bull case that takes ETH-USD to $250,000, which would be roughly 7,700% upside from about $3,180 at the time of his remarks. In the same framework, he argued for a potential $5,000 per share valuation for BMNR, supported by a proposed increase in authorized shares from 500 million to 50 billion to permit stock splits and capital raise flexibility. Those figures are clearly not base-case projections, but they reveal how far some institutional players are prepared to extrapolate Ethereum’s role in the system.

Staking economics and the MAVAN validator network as an ETH income engine

BitMine is not only holding ETH-USD for appreciation. It plans to deploy a MAVAN validator network in 2026, targeting around $374 million in annual staking revenue. With 4.14 million ETH already on its books and a target to reach 5% of total supply, BitMine is building a dedicated yield engine anchored on ETH staking. Principal is denominated in ETH, and income is also denominated in ETH, making BMNR’s economics tightly coupled to Ethereum’s consensus and fee structure.
For long-term investors, this shows why large institutions increasingly treat ETH-USD as both a capital asset and a yield source. Staking rewards provide a cash-flow-like stream on top of any price appreciation, which is a structural difference versus a non-yielding asset.

Protocol upgrades: Fusaka, PeerDAS and blob capacity for rollups

Network upgrades are quietly improving Ethereum’s capacity. The Fusaka upgrade introduced PeerDAS, improving how layer-2 rollups publish data back to the base chain. Transaction fees on major rollups have already dropped meaningfully, which lowers the cost of using Ethereum’s scaling stack.
This has been followed by a parameter-only fork that raised the blob target from 10 to 14 and the blob limit from 15 to 21. Blobs carry rollup data, so those changes directly increase available data throughput per block. The effect is incremental rather than dramatic, but it pushes the ecosystem toward higher capacity and lower average per-transaction costs for users transacting on rollups while still anchoring security on the main chain.

Scaling debates: ZK-EVM complexity and centralization risk

Not all parts of the roadmap are uncontested. As more projects move toward complex ZK-EVM architectures, the hardware requirements for proving and validating can rise substantially. Critics argue that this could create centralization pressure as only well-capitalized operators can run the heaviest infrastructure, while smaller participants are pushed to rely on those operators’ proofs.
So far, this has not had a direct impact on ETH-USD pricing, but it sits in the background of the long-term narrative. Investors now have to weigh better throughput and lower fees against the risk that parts of the stack become reliant on a relatively small set of technical gatekeepers.

Macro backdrop: Fed expectations, bond yields and crypto risk appetite

Macro conditions remain an important layer. The U.S. 10-year yield near 4.14% reflects a bond market that is starting to price more Fed easing after weaker private-sector payroll numbers and softer data. Rate markets have nudged toward at least two additional quarter-point cuts by year-end compared with earlier expectations.
That backdrop favors risk assets, including crypto, as long as it is not associated with an outright growth scare. At the same time, spot Bitcoin ETFs have absorbed about $486 million in outflows over two days, which shows that positioning and flow dynamics can weaken price even when the macro narrative looks supportive. Ethereum trades inside that environment: macro tailwinds, but ETF and spot flows that remain volatile and can easily flip sentiment.

Key bullish and bearish levels for ETH-USD in the current cycle

The immediate bullish line in the sand is the EMA cluster between roughly $3,128 and $3,349. As long as ETH-USD trades below that band, every bounce is technically a rally into resistance. A daily close above $3,350, backed by rising spot participation and ETF inflows, would be the first clean signal that the corrective phase is ending and that upside toward $3,600 and then the $4,400 resistance region is realistic.
On the downside, the $3,000 area is the first structural support. A break and sustained close below $3,000 would keep ETH-USD locked inside the descending channel and reopen the path toward the $2,800 region. If broader risk sentiment deteriorates and ETF flows turn negative, a deeper retest of the $2,400–$2,600 demand zone becomes plausible, representing a 20–25% pullback from current levels, in line with scenarios mapped by several analysts.
Beyond that tactical range, some long-horizon projections still point much higher. Certain market views see a path to $10,000 ETH by 2026 under a combination of continued network upgrades, strong ETF demand and a supportive macro environment. Tom Lee’s $250,000 scenario is far more extreme and assumes a multi-cycle re-rating of Ethereum’s role as global settlement and yield infrastructure rather than just a speculative asset.

Synthesis: fundamentals improve while ETH-USD consolidates below resistance

Ethereum sits at a point where on-chain and institutional fundamentals are improving, but price has not yet broken out of a corrective, range-bound structure. ETF inflows have restarted, whales and treasuries like BitMine are accumulating aggressively, staking economics are strengthening, and upgrades such as Fusaka and the blob parameter increase are reducing friction for users. At the same time, ETH-USD still trades below a dense EMA wall between $3,128 and $3,349, short-term charts show a descending channel, and spot flows on rallies often look more like distribution than eager accumulation.
Until ETH-USD can clear that resistance band with clear volume and healthier spot inflows, the market remains a consolidation story with asymmetric long-term potential rather than a confirmed breakout. The tape is telling you to respect the current range, while the fundamentals explain why large players are quietly building exposure on dips instead of exiting the ecosystem.

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