Ethereum sees $1B in buying before leverage arrives – What happens next?

Ethereum’s [$ETH] been looking different lately. The buying’s showing up where it matters, and derivatives don’t look wildly overheated.

Only time will tell if we see a straight move up. However, the current state of things makes it look very possible.

Ethereum buying has picked up massively

A whale wallet recently spent $13.55 million to pick up 5,425 $ETH at around $2,498.

There’s more where that came from. Another address received 40,000 $ETH worth $100.09 million from Binance.

And it’s not just retail. Over the past eight trading days, BlackRock’s ETHA ETF saw $889.8 million in net purchases. More importantly, there was buying on every one of those days. Put together, this is close to $1 billion in visible $ETH demand that we know of.

One large purchase can easily be dismissed. Several purchases though? Hard to ignore.

$ETH supply shrinks, buyers are stepping in

Consider this. $ETH reserves across exchanges have fallen to 14.93 million $ETH; it’s been falling for most of the year.

Coins on exchanges are the ones most readily available to be sold, so this is important. While whales and institutional buyers are running in, the pool of available $ETH is getting smaller.

Demand is improving; available supply is moving the other way. And when those two trends happen together, the market usually becomes more sensitive.

U.S. spot demand rises, but leverage is under control

Ethereum’s Coinbase Premium Index (CPI) is positive again, near 0.029. This comes after multiple months of the chart being below zero.

What does this mean, though? When the CPI for an asset is positive, it means there’s more trading on Coinbase for said asset than on other exchanges.

There’s more buying demand from American investors.

What makes things a lot more interesting is open interest (OI), which was near $14.5 billion. That’s well below earlier 2026 highs.

This is a spot-led time of buying. The current state of things is very much accumulation first. For now, that’s healthy.

But will it stay that way? If OI rises faster than price, things could get risky.

Final Summary

• There’s been loads of $ETH buying, just as reserves fall.
• Right now, this looks very much spot-dominated than leverage-focused.