ETH Put Skew Compresses to 9% as BitMine’s 5.74M-Coin Stack Holds $1,500 Line
Deribit skew, treasury flows and outperformance data suggest structural support is building under ETH even as fee revenue stays weak.
ETH has rallied roughly 15% over five sessions, moving off the $1,500 low printed on June 26 to trade near $1,785. The bid has coincided with a sharp reset in derivatives positioning: the Deribit 25% delta put-call skew has compressed to a 9% premium for puts, down from 15% a week earlier, per Laevitas data. Skew readings above 12% typically flag extreme fear, so the move signals de-risking of hedges rather than a flip to outright bullish positioning.
Treasury flow: BitMine buys through an $8B unrealized loss
On the supply side, BitMine Immersion Technologies added 325,000 ETH to its balance sheet over the past month, per bmnr.rocks, taking total holdings to 5.74 million ETH. The position is currently underwater by roughly $8 billion on a mark-to-market basis, yet accumulation has continued uninterrupted toward the company’s stated target of 5% of total ETH supply.
For desks tracking treasury-company wallets as a structural bid, this is one of the more unusual conviction signals currently visible in ETH’s order flow — a large holder buying size against negative unrealized P&L. That behavior lines up closely with the $1,500 level holding through the recent drawdown.
Relative strength diverges from weak fee generation
ETH has outperformed total crypto market capitalization by 7% over the trailing 30 days, per TradingView data. That outperformance sits awkwardly against onchain fundamentals: network fees remain depressed, per DefiLlama figures, which suppresses ETH burn and pushes the asset back toward net-inflationary supply dynamics.
In other words, the price action is being driven more by treasury-scale accumulation and options positioning than by base-layer fee capture — a distinction that matters for anyone modeling ETH’s supply-demand balance going forward.
Infrastructure and policy catalysts add to the bid
Robinhood Chain, an EVM-compatible layer-2 built on Arbitrum technology, went live on July 2, rolling out tokenized stock trading across more than 120 countries alongside DeFi integrations with Uniswap, 1inch and Morpho. The launch adds another institutional settlement rail on top of Ethereum’s base layer, at a moment when L2 fee capture has been a persistent drag on mainnet revenue.
Separately, Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is in final testing ahead of a target rollout later in 2026, aimed at increasing parallel transaction processing, expanding data throughput and cutting database bloat — explicitly framed around institutional-grade infrastructure needs. Sentiment tied to the pending Digital Assets CLARITY Act in Congress has also fed into the rally, though the bill continues to face banking-sector pushback over stablecoin regulation.
Net read: fee and burn metrics stay soft, but treasury-scale ETH buying, a cooling options skew and expanding TradFi rails form the current basis for the path toward $2,000.
Read more: Ethereum’s ‘Lean’ Rebuild Targets 100TB State as ETH/BTC Breaks Downtrend
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