Ethereum closed May 2026 roughly 12.6% in the red, a figure that would be unremarkable in isolation but carries more weight given the context
Ethereum closed May 2026 roughly 12.6% in the red, a figure that would be unremarkable in isolation but carries more weight given the context. May was Ethereum's strongest month in both 2024 and 2025, posting gains of 24.7% and 41.1% respectively. The break in that seasonal pattern is one signal among several that the pressure on ETH this year is not simply cyclical noise. As of early June, ETH is trading near $1,870, approximately 22% below its May high of $2,450 and roughly 60% below the all-time high of $4,954 it recorded in August 2025. The May 28 break below $2,000, the second such breach this year, though the first to hold rather than quickly recover, arrived alongside a set of conditions that have not previously coincided in the same way during this cycle.
The ETF flow picture is the most direct explanation. US spot Ethereum ETFs logged net outflows of $401.62 million in May reversing April's net inflows of $354 million and representing the third-largest monthly outflow since late 2025. Data showed that daily outflows persisted from May 11 onward, with the sharpest single-day withdrawal coming on May 12, when investors pulled roughly $130.6 million from the funds. What makes the outflow streak notable is not its absolute size, cumulative inflows into US spot Ethereum ETFs since launch still stand above $11.75 billion, but its timing, arriving in the same window as derivatives leverage was expanding rather than contracting. Aggregate ETH futures open interest reached a record 16.39 million ETH, roughly $32.5 billion in notional value, on the same day the price broke below $2,000, per Coinglass data, a combination that historically produces disorderly price action rather than clean directional trends, as the removal of spot bids intersected with forced deleveraging in the futures stack.
Layered on top of those flow dynamics is the question of Ethereum's competitive position within DeFi, which has shifted more meaningfully over the past 18 months than most observers anticipated. According to DefiLlama, Ethereum's share of total DeFi TVL fell from 63.5% in January 2025 to approximately 53% by May 2026, even as Ethereum's absolute TVL held near $41 billion, making it still by a substantial margin the largest blockchain by value locked. The erosion is not a consequence of Ethereum losing what it had, but of other networks growing faster: Solana now holds 6.76% of DeFi TVL, BNB Chain 6.55%, with Base, Arbitrum, and Bitcoin-native DeFi all expanding their shares simultaneously. The additional complication for Ethereum's valuation thesis is that layer-2 scaling, which was supposed to strengthen Ethereum's position by extending its reach, has also reduced mainnet fee revenue by routing activity away from the base layer, compressing the deflationary ETH burn mechanism that previously underpinned bullish supply arguments.
The infrastructure argument
Against that backdrop, Glamsterdam is carrying more narrative weight than any individual protocol upgrade ordinarily would. The Ethereum Foundation confirmed in May that the upgrade, originally targeted for June, is now more realistically expected in Q3 2026, following the conclusion of the Soldøgn Interop devnet in early May, which completed its multi-client compatibility testing one day behind schedule. The technical scope remains intact: two headline EIPs anchor the release, EIP-7732, which introduces Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), and EIP-7928, Block-Level Access Lists (BALs). Together, they are designed to separate block building from block validation, enable parallel transaction execution, and push Ethereum's gas limit from its current ceiling of approximately 60 million to a post-upgrade target of 200 million, which the Foundation has described as a "credible post-Glamsterdam target." At that throughput level, Ethereum's layer-1 capacity would approach 10,000 transactions per second, a figure that would represent the most significant L1 scaling event in the network's history.
The ePBS component deserves particular attention because its implications extend beyond raw throughput. Under the current architecture, validators who want to outsource block construction to specialised builders, capturing more of the maximal extractable value embedded in each block, do so through MEV-boost, a third-party sidecar that introduces a relay dependency outside the protocol's consensus guarantees. Glamsterdam enshrines that separation directly into the protocol, removing the relay dependency, reducing the attack surface for censorship, and distributing MEV rewards more fairly across validators rather than concentrating them in the hands of the largest builder operations. For institutional stakers in particular, whose compliance requirements create a strong preference for protocol-native over third-party infrastructure, this is a structurally significant change that is separate from and arguably more durable than the throughput argument.
The scope discipline imposed on Glamsterdam also matters. FOCIL, the fork-choice inclusion list mechanism that would have further addressed censorship resistance, was moved out of Glamsterdam and into Hegotá, Ethereum's planned second 2026 upgrade, after the Base engineering team publicly warned that including it alongside ePBS risked pushing the entire release beyond 2026. That is a meaningful piece of project governance: the Foundation chose timeline adherence over feature completeness, a tradeoff it has not always made well historically. Verkle Trees, which would reduce node storage requirements by up to 90% and enable stateless clients, are similarly reserved for Hegotá. The cumulative picture is of a roadmap that has grown in ambition without abandoning execution discipline, though that discipline has yet to be tested at mainnet activation.
Priced in, or not yet priced
The question that separates the bullish and bearish readings of ETH's current position is whether Glamsterdam can function as a re-rating event for a price that has already moved significantly in anticipation of a better network, or whether the upgrade's delivery will confirm a pattern that has played out repeatedly in Ethereum's history: that protocol improvements price in before they arrive and release selling pressure on activation.
The data that complicates a straightforwardly bearish conclusion is the divergence between ETF flows and long-term holder behaviour. The Glassnode Hodler Net Position Change, a metric tracking accumulation and distribution among mid-to-long-term holders, has remained continuously positive since February 24, a streak that held through the May outflow period and grew in intensity through mid-May. The February contrast is significant: that was the one stretch in 2026 where hodler conviction broke alongside ETF outflows, and ETH fell 19.6% in that month. The same confluence has not produced the same outcome this time, at least not yet, suggesting that the selling pressure coming through ETF redemptions is being absorbed at the holder level by a cohort that is adding to positions rather than reducing them. Whether that absorption is sufficient to establish a floor depends on variables, the trajectory of the US-Iran conflict, the Federal Reserve's posture on rates, and the timing of Glamsterdam itself, that the on-chain data cannot resolve.
What the on-chain data does suggest is that Ethereum's DeFi TVL position, though compressed as a percentage of the global market, remains structurally intact at approximately $45 billion, and that the long-term holder base is treating the current price range as an accumulation window rather than an exit. Glamsterdam, when it lands, will not resolve the macro headwinds. What it might do, assuming the devnet milestones hold and Q3 activation materialises, is shift the technical argument about what Ethereum is capable of at the base layer, at a moment when that argument has rarely been more contested and the market has rarely been less willing to pay for potential.
No comments yet
Be the first to share your take when accounts launch.
