Bitwise Found What’s Really Driving Ethereum Price, And It’s Not Fundamentals

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 w