Ethereum Plunges 10% After Smashing Into This Historical Barrier

On-chain data shows Ethereum has once again found rejection at a level that has repeatedly acted as a resistance barrier  in previous cycles.

As explained by on-chain analytics firm Glassnode in a new post on X, the ETH rally stumbled after the asset’s price hit a level of a historically relevant pricing model.

The model in question is the “Active Realized Price,” which, in short, tells us about the cost basis of the average investor or address on the Ethereum network. This indicator differs from the usual Realized Price in that it excludes the inactive or lost supply from its data.

Now, here is the chart shared by Glassnode that shows the trend in the model, as well as its +1 standard deviation (SD) level, over the last few years:

As displayed in the above graph, Ethereum has recently been trading above the Active Realized Price, indicating that the average holder of the asset has been sitting on some net unrealized profit.

The recent price rally took the cryptocurrency far above this metric and in fact resulted in a retest of the +1 SD level. From the chart, it’s visible that this level is currently situated around $4,700.

This is around where the asset topped out last week, before starting on a drawdown of around 10%. Thus, it would appear that the threshold may have played the role of resistance.

According to the analytics firm, this isn’t anything unusual, as the line has repeatedly acted as a barrier in past cycles. The explanation behind this trend may lie in the fact that this level is around where investor profits become significant enough for mass selloffs with the motive of profit-taking become likely to occur.

In the current cycle so far, Ethereum has been able to breach the line once, back in March 2024. This break lasted only briefly, however, suggesting the selling pressure was again a big obstacle to the bullish momentum.

In some other news, last week was the strongest for the Ethereum spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) since their launch in the US, as Glassnode has pointed out in another X post.

As is visible in the above chart, the US Ethereum spot ETFs saw a massive green netflow spike last week, with 649,000 tokens of the asset entering into the wallets associated with these funds. The coin’s rally to the top above $4,700 occurred as these inflows took place.

At the time of writing, Ethereum is floating around $4,360, up 2% over the last week.