What is documented: the DeFi contracts on the Ethereum blockchain held 19.44 million ETH on Sunday afternoon, against 20.83 million on October 26. That is 1.39 million ETH less, a drop of 6.7
What is documented: the DeFi contracts on the Ethereum blockchain held 19.44 million ETH on Sunday afternoon, against 20.83 million on October 26. That is 1.39 million ETH less, a drop of 6.7 percent, and at today's price of $2,267 it corresponds to $3.16 billion. Our assessment follows further below: this is the first genuine outflow since late September, and it changes the starting position for the coming weeks more than the price level itself does.
What separates this from the headlines of recent days is the unit of measurement. Anyone who measures the value of these deposits in dollars has seen a decline of $9.13 billion since the beginning of October, from $53.25 billion to $44.12 billion. Most of that was never an outflow at all, but the falling ETH price. Where the price can go over a horizon of months is put in context by our Ethereum price prediction. For the next few weeks a different question counts, and it reads: how much ETH is actually still sitting in these contracts?
DeFi stands for decentralised finance applications. These are programs on the blockchain where investors deposit their coins into a contract and receive interest, a share of fees or a tradable substitute token in return. The more ETH is locked there, the less is available for sale at short notice.
For this article we recalculated 35 days from scratch, not in dollars but in ETH. The basis is the daily deposit values for the Ethereum blockchain at DefiLlama together with the daily closing prices for Ether. Dividing one by the other gives the quantity of ETH that sat in the contracts on each individual day. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on November 1, 2026, across 35 calendar days.
The result contradicts the first impression. Between September 28 and October 26 the deposited quantity rose from 19.84 to 20.83 million ETH, an increase of 0.99 million coins or 5.0 percent. Over the same period the price fell from $2,688 to $2,327, a decline of 13.4 percent. Anyone reading the dollar figure during those four weeks saw a shrinking market. Measured in ETH, capital was flowing in.
On October 28 that flipped. In a single day the deposited quantity fell from 20.79 to 19.63 million ETH, a decline of 1.16 million coins. Since then the figure has oscillated between 19.22 and 19.56 million and stands at 19.44 million today. The price has barely moved this week; it sits 2.9 percent below where it was seven days ago. So the dollar figure misleads in the other direction here, because that value has even risen slightly since October 30, while the quantity of ETH has fallen.
The mechanism behind this is simpler than the numbers suggest, and it is rarely explained. A DeFi contract does not hold dollars. It holds coins, in this case ETH and ETH-related instruments such as liquid staking tokens. The usual yardstick for the size of this market, however, converts those holdings into dollars afresh every day. If the price falls by a fifth, the yardstick shrinks by a fifth, even if no investor has moved a single coin.
For holders these are two different pieces of news. A pure price decline with holdings unchanged means: investors are staying put, and supply on the exchanges is not growing. A decline measured in ETH means: coins are leaving the contracts and can end up on an exchange. Only the second case raises selling pressure, and that is precisely the case that has applied since October 28.
To put the size in context: total ETH supply stood at 122.18 million coins on Sunday. The 19.44 million in the DeFi contracts therefore amount to 15.91 percent of all existing Ether. Ethereum at the same time accounts for 51.84 percent of all deposits held on blockchains anywhere, measured in dollars across every network. What is happening here is not a side issue of the market.
The contracts hold their deposits in ETH, not in dollars. That is why quantity and market value drift apart.
The date is not arbitrary. The attack on Binance and the suspension of withdrawals that followed it fell in the same days. At DefiLlama the holdings in custody at Binance currently sit 23.1 percent below the level of a week ago. The fact that the outflow from the DeFi contracts starts exactly on October 28 suggests a connection: anyone who wants access to their coins in unsettled days takes them out of the contract.
We are not asserting that connection as a proven cause. What is documented is the day, the quantity and the proximity in time. The direction of causality cannot be shown from the deposit data alone, and two events on the same day are not yet proof. What came in on the upgrade front yesterday we described in the Ethereum price prediction of October 31: the Glamsterdam upgrade has been postponed. Since then the price has moved up by 1.1 percent, from $2,242 to $2,267, while the deposited quantity has fallen by roughly another 119,000 ETH. The delay to the upgrade therefore neither triggered the outflow nor stopped it.
Anyone wanting to know where these deposits sit finds a heavily concentrated distribution. On Ethereum, Lido leads with $21.98 billion, followed by Aave V3 with $12.73 billion and the SSV Network with $11.85 billion. Sky Lending comes to $5.04 billion and Morpho Blue to $5.02 billion. Lido is a liquid staking service: you put ETH in, get a tradable instrument back and receive the staking proceeds without running a validator yourself. Aave V3 is a credit market in which deposited coins serve as collateral for loans.
This distribution is relevant to you if you hold deposits yourself. The more the holdings cluster in a few contracts, the more hangs on the quality of individual programs. The daily changes in these contracts ranged between minus 3.3 and plus 1.3 percent on Sunday, so they were calm. The weekly figure paints a different picture: Aave V3 sits 7.5 percent below the level of seven days ago, Sky Lending 8.2 percent, Lido only 2.6 percent. Withdrawals therefore came above all from where coins were serving as loan collateral, and less from staking.
Which providers of staking proceeds are reachable in Europe and what conditions they set is laid out in our comparison of staking platforms. The difference between a contract on the blockchain and an offer through a supervised provider is not a detail there; it decides who is liable in a dispute.
The second side belongs to the quantity question, and you only see it if you set total supply alongside. According to data from ultrasound.money, ETH supply stood at 122,179,733 coins on Sunday afternoon. Thirty days ago it was 122,093,445. Supply has therefore grown by 86,289 ETH, an average of 2,873 coins a day. Annualised, that corresponds to an increase of 0.86 percent.
The reason lies with fees. Ethereum burns part of the transaction fees, and when little is happening on the network it burns little. The base fee stood at 0.043 Gwei on Sunday, which amounts to a fraction of a cent per simple transfer. That is convenient for anyone who wants to move coins, and it means at the same time that the issuance of new ETH to the validators is no longer being offset. Since the Merge in September 2022, supply has grown by 1.66 million ETH.
Taken together, that is the position in which the next month begins: a supply that is growing slightly, and 1.39 million ETH that have come out of the contracts in recent days and have thereby become available.
Ether was quoted at $2,267 on Sunday afternoon, 0.8 percent above where it stood 24 hours earlier, 2.9 percent below the level of a week ago and 16.8 percent below the level of 30 days ago. Two levels can be justified from the data of the past 30 days, and neither has anything to do with round numbers.
On the downside the first sits at $2,242. That is the low of October 31 and at the same time the lowest daily close of the past 30 days. The price stands 1.1 percent above it today. On the upside the second sits at $2,455, the average of the last 30 daily closes. That mean is 8.3 percent away and was last reached on October 22. The high of the period, $2,726 on October 5, is 20.2 percent away and therefore not a reference point for day-to-day decisions for the time being.
What sets these levels apart from yesterday's: on October 31 the $2,242 still stood as a fresh low and thus as an open question. That level has held since, and the price has detached itself from it, albeit with deposits continuing to fall. This combination, a price holding up and a declining deposited quantity, is the real tension of this week.
Anyone drawing income from DeFi accounts for two separate things at tax time.
For the decision whether to leave your own ETH sitting in a contract, what counts is the gap between what you get there and what can be had without price risk. The proceeds from Ethereum staking stood at 2.63 percent a year at the end of October, as we reported on October 28. That figure is not a promise; it depends on the number of validators and on fee revenue, and fee revenue is currently, see above, very low.
Alongside that sits price risk. A year of staking at 2.63 percent is eaten up within days by a price decline of the kind seen over the past 30 days, 16.8 percent. Anyone holding ETH is therefore holding a price position first and an interest position only second. The same applies to credit markets such as Aave V3: there you receive interest on deposited coins, but you additionally carry the risk that a loan against your collateral is force-closed if the price falls.
This is where the concrete action for European investors lies, and it has a direct bearing on the outflow of recent days. Anyone taking ETH out of a contract may be changing their tax position in doing so, on two points.
The first point is the holding period. As things stand today, gains from the sale of crypto assets in Germany are tax-free after a holding period of one year. Whether depositing into a DeFi contract interrupts that period or restarts it depends on whether a different asset arises in the process, such as a liquid staking token. Where the reform of the holding period currently stands is something we track on our page on the status of the holding period reform. The second point is the income itself. Interest and staking proceeds are to be declared in the year in which they accrue, regardless of whether you have sold them.
In practical terms that means: for every movement into or out of a contract, note the date, the quantity and the price at that moment. Anyone reconstructing this after the fact usually comes unstuck on the liquid staking tokens, because their price deviates from the ETH price. Documenting early is considerably cheaper than estimating later, and where the treatment of individual transactions is unclear, the question belongs with a tax adviser and not in a forum.
Our assessment: the outflow of 1.39 million ETH is the more important signal of this week, not the price level of $2,267. What speaks for that reading is that the deposited quantity rose for four weeks against a falling price and only turned on October 28. As long as a market sees inflows while prices fall, sellers remain scarce. If that inflow turns, material comes back into circulation, and the 0.86 percent of annual supply growth is added on top.
What speaks against it is the length of the series. Four days are not a trend, and 19.44 million ETH is still above the level of September 28. It remains possible that this is a shift into self-custody, triggered by the unease after the attack on Binance, rather than an intention to sell. That will be decided by whether the deposited quantity falls below 19.2 million ETH over the next seven days, the low of October 30, or whether it stabilises.
Three steps that follow from the figures in this article:
(As of November 1, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Crypto investments are highly risky and a total loss is possible.)
