ETH And SOL Struggling To Stay Above Water

Ethereum has tested the key $2.8k level this afternoon, a bearish sign for the second leading cryptocurrency. After getting back over $3k earlier this week, ETH has not been able to sustain this level, and has seen shorts take over the order book with continued selling. ETH funding rates on perpetual futures have gone to completely flat levels on some exchanges, while reaching negative figures on others. ETH Q1 2026 Futures contracts are just barely in contango today. End of January 2026 options contracts are seeing heavy volume on both puts and calls, as traders try and hedge their bets of where they think ETH will head in January. The $4k and above level for ETH seems like a long lost memory at this point.

Much like ETH, Solana has not been faring well today. After briefly flirting with getting back to $130 per token, the high speed blockchain has cratered down to the $118 level. Unlike some other tokens, SOL hasn’t been at this price range since April of this year. Coming off the back of the premier conference for Solana in Breakpoint, this price action is quite disappointing for SOL bulls. Solana’s price chart has been in a downward trend for quite some time, and this is also the case with new addresses created on Solana, along with active addresses on the blockchain. The Decentralized AI and Meme season SOL participants saw from the end of 2024 into early 2025 was the last real positive ecosystem narratives Solana experienced. The exciting developments of ZCash being wrapped on Solana have been seemingly short-lived, as the privacy narrative has faded out of the crypto zeitgeist.