Who is still buying ether? A data look at ETFs, treasuries and stakers in October
Ether ETFs lost more than $1 billion in October while treasuries slowed and stakers held firm. A channel-by-channel look at where the selling came from.
ETHEREUMETFS & INSTITUTIONSANALYSIS
Daniel Hartley
10/28/20263 min read
Ether has had a difficult October. The price fell from about $2,700 at the start of the month to around $2,400 by its final week, and by October 21 it was down nearly 18% for the year, according to CoinGecko figures cited by Cointelegraph. Price alone, however, says little about who is selling and who is still buying. Breaking demand into its three largest institutional channels, spot ETFs, corporate treasuries and stakers, gives a clearer picture of where the pressure is coming from.
ETFs: the clearest source of selling
US spot ether ETFs are the most visible channel and the weakest one this month. Net outflows passed $1.08 billion between October 1 and October 21, according to SoSoValue data, erasing September's roughly $832 million of inflows. That made October the largest monthly outflow of 2026 with several trading sessions still to go. Year-to-date net inflows shrank to about $485 million.
The pattern is worth noting. Ether ETF flows tend to amplify moves in either direction because many holders are tactical allocators rather than long-term believers, and the products track macro risk appetite closely. US spot bitcoin ETFs, by contrast, were close to flat for the month over the same period. Investors who cut crypto exposure appear to have trimmed ether first.
Staking was supposed to change this dynamic. BlackRock's iShares Staked Ethereum Trust, ETHB, began trading in March and stakes between 70% and 95% of its holdings, passing most of the rewards on to investors. Yet a network reward rate of under 3% has not been enough to offset a falling price. Yield helps holders stay put in a sideways market; it does little in a drawdown.
Treasuries: still buying, but slower
Corporate ether treasuries remain the steadiest buyers. BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest of them, reported holding about 6.02 million ETH as of October 4, close to 4.9% of total supply. The pace, however, has cooled. The company added about 15,000 ETH in its early-October update, a fraction of the weekly purchases it made during its first months of accumulation in 2025. That slowdown matters because treasury companies fund their buying by issuing shares or debt. When their stocks trade near or below the value of the ether they hold, issuing new equity to buy more becomes harder to justify to shareholders. The treasury bid is therefore pro-cyclical: strong when markets are rising, quieter when they fall.
Stakers: a temporary shock, not a stampede
The staking data looked alarming in early October. Ethereum's validator exit queue jumped from about 166,000 ETH at the end of September to a peak above 850,000 ETH on October 2, according to ValidatorQueue data, after MetaMask Staking pulled validators run through Lido following a security incident. Wait times to withdraw stretched to around two weeks.
Context changes the reading. The exits were largely precautionary, Lido said it expected much of the stake to be redeposited, and the entry queue at the time held roughly 1.46 million ETH, more than the exit queue. Total staked ether stood near 43.7 million ETH, or about 36% of supply, with an estimated annual reward rate of around 2.6%. Stakers as a group are not leaving the network; one large operator reshuffled its validators.
What the data adds up to
Put the three channels side by side and the picture is uneven. ETF holders are the marginal sellers, treasuries are still net buyers at a slower pace, and stakers are broadly stable. That combination explains why ether has fallen more than bitcoin this month without a wholesale collapse in on-chain commitment.
It also highlights ether's dependence on flows from traditional markets. When ETF demand turns, there is no equally large and price-insensitive buyer to take its place. The network's own fee burn, which reduced supply during busier periods, offers little support while base-layer activity is subdued and most transactions settle cheaply on layer 2 networks. There is a further wrinkle. A large share of short-term trading in ether runs through futures and perpetual swaps rather than spot markets, which means sentiment can flip quickly once leveraged positions are closed. Short-term price action in ether therefore often reflects positioning more than any change in the network's fundamentals.
For the rest of the year, four data points are worth tracking. The first is daily ether ETF flows, and whether staking products like ETHB start attracting net inflows on yield alone. The second is weekly purchase updates from the largest treasury companies and how their shares trade relative to their ether holdings. The third is the balance between Ethereum's entry and exit queues. The fourth is the ETH/BTC ratio, which shows whether investors are rotating back into ether or continuing to favor bitcoin. A turn in ETF flows would be the earliest sign that October's selling pressure has run its course.