Ether ended Q3 up approximately 71% for its best Q3 in history and best quarter since Q1 2021. For comparison, it was approximately 43% for bitcoin for the quarter.
Ether stalled below $2,800 again. A weak jobs report caused it to rise to $2,775 on Friday, but the gains faded as Treasury yields rebounded and it returned to close at $2,668.59.
ETFs swung from approximately +$689.8 million to approximately −$118 million (provisional) with four straight outflow days on the data available after seven straight inflow days.
MetaMask's validator exits led to an ETH staking exit queue of approximately 851,000 ETH, up from about 166,000 and the highest amount of the year, with Lido expecting much of it to be re-staked.
Glamsterdam is set for Sepolia on October 6th with no mainnet date, and BitMine passed six million ETH.
Part of a seriesMonday, 28 September: quarter-end week opens flat
Ether closed up 0.02% at $2,688.71, in a range of $2,637.07 to $2,719.83. That $2,637 low turned out to be the floor for the whole week. ETFs added $17.1 million for the 7th straight session of inflows. As for ETH-specific news, the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol team updated their Glamsterdam testnet announcement to say the Sepolia activation is at epoch 353,024 (13:53:36 UTC on 6 October) and listed the first client releases. BitMine, which describes itself as the world's largest ETH treasury, also reported buying 17,362 ETH last week, and said it now owns 6,001,302 ETH, about 4.9% of supply, and its first time above six million. About 84% of those (5,067,309) are staked. BitMine has reported a purchase every week since 30 June 2025.
Tuesday, 29 September: the inflow streak ends
Ether fell 0.41% to $2,677.80, pulling back from a high of $2,744.48. ETFs posted a $2.8 million outflow, a small number, but it ended a seven-day inflow streak that included a $689.8 million inflow from 21-25 September. BlackRock’s ETHA lost $8.9 million and Fidelity’s FETH lost $6.7 million, partially offset by a $12.8 million inflow to Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust.
On the protocol front, the Sepolia activation date for Glamsterdam was confirmed with a list of client software versions. They included Go-Ethereum 1.17.6, Nethermind 2.0.0, Besu 26.9.0, Erigon 3.7.0, and Reth 2.7.0 on the execution side, and Prysm 7.2.0, Teku 26.9.1, and Lodestar 1.49.0 on the consensus side. Separately, Bitget resumed Ethereum withdrawals as the second phase of its recovery from its $387.5 million hack.
Wednesday, 30 September: Q3 sets a new record
Ether rose 0.31% to $2,686.01, closing out the third quarter. It posted a gain of 70.6%-71% for the quarter, depending on the start and end timestamps, making it the best third quarter on record and the best quarterly gain since Q1 2021. Bitcoin rose roughly 43% over the same time frame. Ether started at about $1,570 on 1 July and ended the quarter at about $2,689. That gain followed a 29% drop in Q1 and a 25% drop in Q2.
ETFs lost $59.6 million, the biggest outflow of the week. Quarter-end selling partially explains the outflows.
On 30 September, MetaMask disclosed an “ongoing security incident” affecting part of its infrastructure. As part of their response, MetaMask Staking, formerly Consensys Staking, started to exit validators on Lido as a precautionary measure. Lido said stETH holders need take no action; however, because of the exiting of validators, there could be downtime penalties and staking rewards would not be earned. MetaMask said it had found no immediate threat to user wallets.
It was reported by Kaden that 19 MetaMask validators won block rewards. 18 of those rewards were reportedly sent to a different address funded by Tornado Cash. The 18 rewards totaled ~0.36 ETH. Kaden estimated about 17,000 validators holding about 523,000 ETH, roughly $1.4 billion, were being exited as a precaution. Neither company verified Kaden’s report.
Thursday, 1 October: Q4 opens with a modest gain
Ether rose 0.76% to $2,706.43, in a range of $2,673.75 to $2,721.99. ETFs lost another $55.4 million, a third straight outflow day, even as bitcoin funds took in about $103 million the same session.
Friday, 2 October: a weak jobs report sparks a spike that fades
September's US jobs report showed payrolls up just 29,000 against forecasts of roughly 84,000 to 90,000, with unemployment ticking up to 4.2%. Treasury yields fell, and the market-implied odds of an October Fed hike dropped below 20%. Ether appeared to move with bitcoin, spiking to $2,775.21, the high of the week.
Moves were short-lived. Yields climbed again in the afternoon, and ether settled at $2,668.59, down 1.40% on the day and $107, or 3.8%, from the intraday high of $2,775, with a low of $2,652.03. Friday's intraday high of $2,775 was about $30 short of the previous high of $2,806 on September 21, and Ether has not closed above $2,800 in recent weeks.
ETFs saw another day of outflows, a provisional $17.3 million, all from Fidelity's FETH, as BlackRock's ETHA and ETHB remained empty in Farside's data at the time of reporting. On the data available, that made four straight outflow days, with a provisional weekly total of about −$118 million, against $689.8 million inflows the previous week.
The stake exit queue also peaked Friday at 851,000 ETH, up more than five times from about 166,000 ETH on September 29. That was the 2026 high and about 2% of the 43.6 million ETH staked. It was well above the roughly 476,000 ETH exit queue reached in a May surge, and represented a wait time of roughly two weeks.
ETH/USD daily closes, 28 September to 4 October 2026 (Sunday as of writing)
US spot Ethereum ETF net daily flows, 28 September to 2 October 2026 (Friday provisional)
Saturday, 3 October: the quietest day
Ether rose 0.70% to $2,687.24 in a tight range of $2,665.68 to $2,690.00.
Sunday, 4 October: a push back toward $2,730
Ether currently sits just above $2,725 after a 1.5% bump today. It has a daily high of $2,739 and a daily low of $2,687. A BitMine snapshot at 6:30pm ET showed 6,016,414 ETH after an additional purchase of 15,112 ETH, valuing Ether at $2,726. The company announced this on Monday, 5 October.
Why the staking queue spiked
An exodus of validators from the Ethereum staking pool causes a short term blockade. Ethereum controls how fast validators can enter or leave the pools to approximately 57,600 ETH per day each way. CoinDesk described most of the surge as a temporary detour for one operator's coins. Lido forecasts the last of the affected MetaMask validators would stop staking by 7 October and that much of the ETH would be re-staked over the course of a cycle that could take up to 45 days.
There is continued interest in staking on Ethereum. As of Monday, around 1.5 million ETH were waiting to stake, a 25-day queue. This was down from about 2 million ETH and a 35-day queue in early September. As of early Monday, the queue to exit staking was around 786,000 ETH. Around 43.6 million ETH, or roughly 36% of the total ETH supply, is staked, earning around 2.6% annually.
What Glamsterdam's first public test involves
Glamsterdam activates on Sepolia at epoch 353,024, or 13:53:36 UTC on 6 October 2026. It introduces two main innovations: enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS, EIP-7732) and block-level access lists (BALs, EIP-7928). ePBS changes how block building is done in the consensus layer. BALs allow clients to do state and transaction validation in parallel. Other changes to gas pricing and repricing are also part of this upgrade.
Mainnet has no set date, but is aiming for the fourth quarter of 2026. The Hoodi testnet is tentatively set for the 27th of October. The window between the client deadline of 29 September and the planned Sepolia fork is 7 days (instead of the usual 14 days). For Sepolia, Lighthouse needs the pre-release build 8.3.0-rc.0, and some clients' rows were still blank in one report.
What it means
$2,637.07, the low on Monday, is the floor for this week. $2,775.21, the high on Friday, is the ceiling so far. Analysts are looking at $2,737 to $2,768 as the first resistance, with $2,800 next. Downside is seen at $2,635 and $2,610 to $2,583.
The ETF picture cooled sharply from last week's strong performance. Still, Analytics Insight, citing SoSoValue, reported that ETH funds were around $1.5 billion of net inflows for 2026, which it said had overtaken bitcoin's total. Bitcoin's year-to-date flows stood at roughly $930 million at the end of September. BitMine was buying throughout. A record quarter is banked, and the first public test of Glamsterdam is two days away. ETH enters the week with good foundations backing it up, under a price that still has $2,800 to clear.
As of 4 October 2026 (Sunday figures are as of writing). Sources: Investing.com, CoinGecko, Farside Investors, SoSoValue, crypto.news, AOL, Cryptonews.net, FinanceFeeds, Analytics Insight, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, CoinCentral, Decrypt, KuCoin News, TechFlow, Ethereum Foundation, The Coin Republic, CryptoTimes, Cointribune, Bloomingbit, Cryptopolitan, CoinEdition, CryptoTicker, Cryptowisser, Yahoo Finance, CNBC, and CCN reporting.
India Crypto Research operates independently. The information presented herein is intended solely for educational and informational purposes and should not be construed as financial advice. Before making any financial decisions, it's essential to undertake your own thorough research and analysis. If you're uncertain about any financial matters, we strongly recommend seeking guidance from an impartial financial advisor.
