Ethereum Battles Bearish Retail Sentiment Amid Surging ETF Demand

Ethereum (ETH) continues to experience pullback in its price as it recently tested the $4,000 resistance level, a key psychological price mark for the cryptocurrency. Amid this correction, bearish tendencies among investors on Binance have surfaced.

A recent analysis by CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost highlights a significant trend where Binance’s taker buy-sell ratio for Ethereum turned “sharply negative” at the $4,000 mark. This suggests that traders on the exchange have predominantly adopted a selling stance.

Ethereum Tug of War

According to Darkfost, the bearish sentiment on Binance has persisted since the start of November, coinciding with Ethereum’s approach to this critical resistance level.

The analyst pointed out that while this bearish sentiment could typically signal a potential reversal, Ethereum’s price movement has defied seeing high bearish inclination, driven by other influential factors.

Notably, demand for Ethereum Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) has surged, showcasing a growing institutional interest that continues to support Ethereum’s price action.

The surge in demand for Ethereum ETFs signals a shift in market stance where institutional players increasingly influence price movements.

Institutional interest, evidenced by consistent inflows into Ethereum-focused investment products seems to have been pivotal in offsetting the selling pressure observed among retail traders on Binance.

ETH Market Performance And Outlook

So far, Ethereum has seen a significant correction in its price decreasing to as low as $3,616 as of today. At the time of writing, the asset currently trades at a price of $3,621 down by nearly 6% in the past day.

Notably, this price performance has unsurprisingly dropped the asset’s market cap by over $40 billion, falling from over $490 billion seen last week Friday to $434 billion today.

Interestingly, despite this price decrease, Ethereum’s daily trading volume has seen an opposite trend rising from below $60 billion on December 6 to now at $72 billion. Given the current market condition, it is likely that the increase in ETH’s volume is coming from sell-offs.

According to data from Coinglass, in the past 24 hours , 526,828 traders were liquidated with the total liquidations coming in at $1.58 billion. Out of this total liquidations, ETH accounts for roughly $234.72 million.

Long liquidations dominates reaching $208.83 million. Short traders also had their share losses registering $25.89 million worth of ETH liquidations.

Regardless of this, analysts are still optimistic about Ethereum, suggesting that the current price dip is quite “healthy” for ETH’s market.

Featured image created with DALL-E, Chart from TradingView