Ether Touches $1,500, Its Deepest Drawdown Since the 2025 Peak

Ether fell to its deepest drawdown since the 2025 cycle peak on Monday, trading roughly 70% below the record high of $4,953.73 set on August 24, 2025. Crypto.news reported an intraday print of $1,500, a figure that has not been corroborated elsewhere and that daily closes did not confirm, with settled prices holding above $1,550. More than $1 billion in crypto positions were liquidated across the move, with ether longs, leveraged bets on a higher price, taking the heaviest damage. Bitcoin's drawdown from its own record stood at about 50% at the same moment, leaving ether some 20 percentage points worse off than the asset it usually moves alongside.

The Print: An Intraday Low, Not a Settled Level

The distinction between a touch and a close matters more than usual here, because $1,500 is a round number that traders anchor to. One outlet recorded the level; daily closing prices stayed above $1,550, which means the print was exchange-specific and brief rather than a level the market accepted. That pattern is characteristic of forced selling. When leveraged positions are liquidated, the exchange sells into whatever bids remain, and thin weekend and early-week order books let a single cascade reach prices no willing seller chose. The $1 billion in liquidations reported across the day is the mechanism, and the recovery back above $1,550 is the evidence that the low was liquidity rather than valuation.

The Gap: 70% Down Against Bitcoin's 50%

The more durable number is the drawdown. A 70% decline from the August 2025 high puts ether below where a simple beta explanation would place it, because bitcoin was down roughly 50% from its own peak over the same span. That 20-point spread is what separates a broad risk-off move from a repricing of one asset relative to another, and it has widened through a month in which every major crypto asset fell. Ether's larger share of leveraged positioning is part of the explanation, since a market that is longer on the way up unwinds harder on the way down. The rest is a rotation question that the price does not answer on its own.

The Week Before: Bitcoin Under $60,000 and a Streak of Outflows

Monday's move did not arrive on its own. Three days earlier, bitcoin broke below $60,000, hitting an intraday low of $59,743 and triggering $1.57 billion of liquidations in 24 hours, the fourth billion-dollar day in five sessions. Total crypto market capitalization fell to $2.23 trillion in that move, with roughly $200 billion erased. The flows behind it had been negative for weeks: US spot crypto ETFs recorded 13 consecutive outflow sessions through early June, $4.37 billion since mid-May, according to CoinDesk. Ether ETFs shed $52.94 million on the day that streak was tallied, a smaller absolute number than bitcoin's but drawn from a much smaller base. Spot bitcoin ETF assets fell from $104.29 billion on May 15 to $82.83 billion, cutting the funds' share of bitcoin's market value from above 7% to 6.36%.

What Is Unresolved: $1,000 in the Frame

Analysts cited in the crypto.news report named $1,000 as the next level in view, a projection attributed to unnamed analysts rather than a published target, and one that would extend the decline from the record to roughly 80%. What a repricing of this size means beyond trading screens is the open question. Treasuries held in ether, staking returns measured in dollars and the budgets of organizations funded in the asset, the Ethereum Foundation among them, all scale with a price that has fallen by two thirds from its high. None of that has shown up in protocol activity yet, and nothing in the June selloff has been attributed to a technical failure on Ethereum itself. The near-term test is whether the ETF outflow streak breaks before the next leverage flush, because the two have been reinforcing each other all month.