Ethereum’s price has spent much of the past cycle lagging its own institutional and on-chain progress, and Bitwise says the reason is straightforward: ETH is still trading primarily as a Bitcoin proxy, not as a fundamentally valued network. In a new factor-model analysis, the asset manager found BTC has been the dominant force behind weekly ETH returns since 2018, with macro conditions, network activity and ETP flows playing secondary roles.
That finding matters because it cuts against one of the more persistent narratives around Ethereum. Regulatory clarity has improved, institutional access has broadened, and Ethereum still underpins a large share of stablecoin and tokenized-asset activity. Yet ETH remains about 62% below its all-time high, a disconnect Bitwise set out to explain with a model based on 406 weekly observations going back to May 2018.
The answer, at least statistically, is that Bitcoin overwhelms almost everything else. Bitwise said ETH “moves nearly 1:1 with BTC on a weekly basis,” with a coefficient of roughly 0.99. BTC alone explains around 65% of Ethereum’s return variance, making it the clear core driver of price direction.
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The firm’s broader conclusion is blunt. “Adoption fundamentals, such as active addresses, clearly have less impact on Ethereum’s price than many assume,” the report said. “Extending this further, revenue generation appears even less relevant, as it was removed from the GETS model as ‘noise rather than signal.’ Combining both of these conclusions supports the idea that since the start of the model in 2018, Ethereum has been priced more like a network-driven commodity than a business with durable cash flows.”
Other Factors Impacting Ethereum Price
That framing runs through the rest of the report. Financial conditions, measured through the Bloomberg US Financial Conditions Index, emerged as the second most important explanatory variable. Bitwise assigned the factor a coefficient of about 0.05, with mean explanatory power of 11.3%, though that climbed to roughly 40% at peak periods. Network activity, proxied by active addresses, had a smaller coefficient near 0.03 and average explanatory power of 6%, rising to 30% in stronger phases.
ETF flows showed a different pattern. Their coefficient was only around 0.01, but Bitwise said they were “highly significant,” explaining about 10% of ETH variance on average and up to 40% at peak. In other words, flows matter consistently, but not with the same force as BTC-led market beta.
That distinction becomes clearer in different market regimes. Between June and August 2025, Bitwise said Ethereum behaved like a levered Bitcoin trade, with its BTC coefficient rising to between 1.5 and 1.6 as BTC approached fresh highs.
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During the post-FTX stress period in the second half of 2022, the dynamic became even harsher: “Every factor except BTC carried a negative coefficient as returns were explained up to 90% by BTC. In moments like these, cash liquidity is what matters. Not fundamentals, flows or macro. As such, ETH was essentially anchored to BTC.”
There have been exceptions. Bitwise identified May 2021 as the period of lowest BTC sensitivity, when Bitcoin had already peaked but Ethereum kept rallying as active addresses surged during the NFT boom. Still, those idiosyncratic windows appear episodic rather than structural.
The report also undercuts the case that a richer multi-factor framework materially improves short-term forecasting. While the model explains historical returns reasonably well, Bitwise said its out-of-sample performance failed to beat a much simpler AR(1)+BTC model. Most of the predictive value came from Bitcoin exposure and price persistence, while additional factors added only limited forecasting power.
That leaves Ethereum in what Bitwise called a “paradoxical position”: a network with deepening institutional relevance, dominant stablecoin and tokenization market share, and an increasingly focused roadmap, but a price still driven mostly by external beta.
At press time, ETH traded at $2,305.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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