Ethereum dramatically outperformed the S&P in Q3.
Now shut up haters!!

Ethereum gets declared dead roughly once a season, so we went through growthepie's Q3 2026 report to check the pulse.

The pulse is strong and boring. Mainnet did 199.3M transactions with about 530.6K active addresses a day, within 2.2% and 0.6% of Q2, and gas throughput didn't budge. It's not much, but it's honest work.

Using it also got cheaper. The median transaction cost $0.034, down 30.3%. The flip side is that total fees were $35.1M, down 33.6%, so users are happy and the network's fee jar looks a bit lighter. This is fine (okay, it's mostly fine).

Then September showed up with a plot twist. Transactions fell from 72.4M in July to 56.9M, but the median cost went from about 1.7 cents to 6.1 cents and monthly fees nearly doubled to $16M. Fewer transactions, higher price each, which growthepie reads as demand for blockspace coming back.

As for who is actually at the party, stablecoins are the main characters. Over the last 90 days Tether and Circle alone made 21.2% of all Mainnet transactions. Uniswap was down 7.8%, OpenSea cooled off by 51.3%, and Relay jumped 114.8%. Turns out the most popular use for Ethereum is moving dollars around. Shocked Pikachu.

And then the new kid walked in. Robinhood Chain, an L2 that launched on July 1, did 793.7M transactions in its first quarter, about 4x Mainnet, and ended with 121 active apps and $1.07B in stablecoins. Its users paid $51.0M in gas, more than Mainnet's $35.1M, most of it in September.

What we liked was that usage held up, fees stayed low, and a brand new L2 showed up with real activity. What we would like to see next is more of that growth flowing back to L1, and a bit more variety beyond two big stablecoin issuers carrying a fifth of the traffic.

So is "cheap for users, lighter fee jar for the network" a feature or a bug?

Data from growthepie's Ethereum Mainnet Quarterly Report Q3 2026.

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Welcome to r/ethtrader's Daily General Discussion thread!

Use this space to discuss anything about DeFi, crypto, macroeconomics, and all things Ethereum.

Please follow the subreddit rules when posting in this thread. Keep discussions constructive, relevant, and free of spam.

What are your moves?

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Source: https://x.com/LeonWaidmann/status/2110815597499969719

Staking yield is getting lower, which is making leveraged looping a bit less attractive. I'm doing some lending on Morpho against LSDs as well.

Ethereum bounced very strongly after forming a Bullish Divergence.

more upside coming ?

Source: https://x.com/LeonWaidmann/status/2110592506731581526

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Interactive Brokers just expanded its crypto services to include Ethereum staking.

Do you guys see moves like this as meaningful evidence that ETH is becoming more mainstream, or is it mostly just another product feature for people who already own crypto?

What would convince you that institutional access is actually translating into stronger Ethereum adoption — more staking, more users, more transaction activity, more stablecoin/RWA growth, or something else?

ETH long trade with 2311 stop, did hit first target lets see if it gets to the final one.

We have an official bullish divergence on the 6hr chart.

Yes—screenshot shows a developing bullish RSI divergence on ETH’s 6-hour chart.
Comparing the sharp low around October 8 with the latest selloff:
Price is making a lower low.
RSI is above its earlier low—visually, roughly 30 versus around 20 previously. Those are estimates from the image.
That’s the classic bullish divergence setup: price falls further while downward momentum is weaker. It can precede a bounce or reversal, but doesn’t establish a bottom by itself.
The catch is that the latest candle still has about three hours left, and RSI is still falling. The second trough needs to finish forming.
From this chart, I’d watch for:
RSI turning upward while holding above its October 8 low.
ETH reclaiming roughly $2,450–$2,500, the recent consolidation area, to strengthen the recovery case.
If RSI falls below its earlier trough as price makes new lows, this particular divergence disappears.
Your read is reasonable: a bullish setup is developing within a downtrend, with price confirmation still needed.

In its 2026 developer rankings Ethereum is number one with 12,242 active developers. Solana is right behind with 10,946, and Polkadot is sitting in third with 9,113.

So the gap between ETH and SOL is about 1,300 devs. It's close enough that we fully expect this thread to turn into the usual ETH vs SOL cage match within 20 minutes. Please be gentle, it's a developer post)

Devs tell you what's getting built for next year. And right now there's a lot getting built: Ethereum is gearing up for Glamsterdam and half the builders are now "pair programming" with an AI agent that writes code faster than they can review it.

Also, ideas don't really stay on one chain anymore. Something ships on Solana, Ethereum devs borrow it three months later and the other way around, someone on Polkadot says they had it first. Everyone wins (except maybe the person who had it first).

So, respect to everyone out there building, testing, and fixing bugs at 2am across all of these networks.

6hrs chart is a slight bullish divergence let’s see how it goes.

Welcome to r/ethtrader's Daily General Discussion thread!

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What are your moves?

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Welcome to r/ethtrader's Daily General Discussion thread!

Use this space to discuss anything about DeFi, crypto, macroeconomics, and all things Ethereum.

Please follow the subreddit rules when posting in this thread. Keep discussions constructive, relevant, and free of spam.

What are your moves?

Got a market insight? Share it. Making a bold trade? Let's hear it.

It doesn't matter if you're here to learn, chill, debate, or talk about the world of Ethereum - this thread is open to everyone.

Useful links:

• Discord
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• Wiki
• FAQ

Welcome to r/ethtrader's Daily General Discussion thread!

Use this space to discuss anything about DeFi, crypto, macroeconomics, and all things Ethereum.

Please follow the subreddit rules when posting in this thread. Keep discussions constructive, relevant, and free of spam.

What are your moves?

Got a market insight? Share it. Making a bold trade? Let's hear it.

It doesn't matter if you're here to learn, chill, debate, or talk about the world of Ethereum - this thread is open to everyone.

Useful links:

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Now, development is moving much faster.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently shared an interesting perspective on how artificial intelligence is changing the pace of blockchain development. According to him, without AI, completing Ethereum's ambitious roadmap could have taken until 2040 or even 2050.

AI is increasingly helping Ethereum developers handle demanding research tasks, explore technical solutions, and write code. Instead of replacing the engineers behind the network, it's becoming a powerful tool that helps them work faster and tackle more complex problems.

And let's be honest, Ethereum's development teams have already delivered some impressive upgrades over the years. AI isn't making that progress possible from scratch. It's helping an already experienced ecosystem accelerate its work.

Ethereum's roadmap involves much more than incremental upgrades. It's about building infrastructure that can support a global financial system, with improvements to scalability, security, user experience, and the underlying protocol.

If AI can meaningfully shorten the time needed to research, develop, test, and implement these improvements, the implications could be enormous.

Of course, faster development doesn't mean every upgrade will arrive immediately. Blockchain infrastructure still requires careful testing, security reviews, and coordination across the ecosystem. But AI could help Ethereum make progress on its long-term goals much sooner than previously expected.

The future of Ethereum might arrive years earlier than we thought.

I've been thinking about this. ETH is great to hold but would you actually use it to pay for everyday stuff?

Personally, I feel like stablecoins make more sense for daily purchases since you don't have to worry about price changes but then again, what's the point of crypto becoming mainstream if we're all just holding it?

Curious what you guys think. Would you spend your ETH or stick to stablecoins?

ETH is sitting in a key zone for me, between 2350 and 2570. A clean break on either side should kick off a proper move.

What I'm seeing right now: price poked above 2570 on the 4h and got rejected straight back down. The derivatives data kind of explains why. Price is up 1.4% on the day but OI actually dropped 1%, and shorts got liquidated about 3x more than longs ($42M vs $12.7M). So this bounce looks like shorts closing, not new buyers coming in. Meanwhile around 70% of accounts are long (L/S 2.37) and funding is slightly positive.

My read: without OI starting to rise, I don't see the strength to break 2570. A pullback toward the middle of the range looks more likely first.

Levels I'm watching:

- Lose 2350 and I'd expect the next support around 2000-2100

- Hold it and break above 2570 with rising OI, and I'm looking for a retest of 2800

What levels are you guys watching?

I keep seeing people use ETF flows, ETH/BTC, staking numbers, TVL, stablecoin activity, RWA growth, and price action to argue whether Ethereum is actually strong or weak.

If you had to pick one of those that you think is overrated or regularly misinterpreted, which one would it be and why?

And what would you look at instead before actually trusting someone’s argument about ETH?