Ethereum Taker Buy-Sell Ratio Falls Critically Low—What Happened Last Time?

The price of Ethereum had quite a rough performance over the past week, falling from its usual range above the $4,600 level to below $4,500. Despite the injection of bullish momentum into the market by the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut, the “king of altcoins” failed to sustain its rally back to the $4,600 region.

According to the latest on-chain data, the Ethereum price could be gearing up for an even longer time in the cold, as investors seem to be turning away from the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. The question, though, is how deep the price of ETH will fall in the coming weeks?

In a recent post on the social media platform X, pseudonymous crypto analyst Darkfost revealed that the Ethereum investors might be flooding out of the market at the moment. This observation is based on the recent downturn in the ETH Taker Buy-Sell Ratio on the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume.

The Taker Buy-Sell Ratio is an on-chain indicator that compares the proportion of the taker buy volumes to the taker sell volumes on crypto exchanges. When the value of this metric is greater than one, it signals that the taker buy volume is higher than the taker sell volume on a crypto exchange. This trend typically points to the willingness of more traders to purchase coins at a higher value on the trading platform.

Meanwhile, a less-than-one value for the Taker Buy-Sell Ratio typically means that the taker sell volume is higher than the taker buy volume on the exchange. Ultimately, this low value indicates that more sellers are offloading their assets at a lower price, precipitating bearish pressure in the market.

According to data from CryptoQuant, the Ethereum Taker Buy-Sell Ratio fell below the 1 threshold to around 0.87 on Friday, September 19. This latest decline marked the third time this metric has fallen this low so far in 2025.

As observed in the above chart, Darkfost noted that the indicator fell as low as 0.85 in January and February 2025. This ratio decline coincided with the bearish trend, during which the price of Ethereum fell to around the $1,500 region.

As of the time of publishing their post on X, Darkfost revealed that the 7-day average of the Taker Buy-Sell Ratio stood at 0.93, which is still short of the 1 threshold. The on-chain analyst concluded that while the Ethereum price is looking to break above the $5,000 milestone, more investors seem to be increasingly betting against the altcoin’s rally. 

Although it is highly unlikely to see a downturn similar to the one in 2025’s first quarter, the latest on-chain events suggest that the price of ETH could still face some bearish pressure in the coming weeks.

As of this writing, the price of ETH stands at around $4,475, reflecting a mere 0.4% leap in the past 24 hours.