Ether plunged to a 13-month low as the crypto market faced selling pressure and heightened security concerns.

Ether plunged to its lowest level in 13 months as the crypto market faced selling pressure and heightened security concerns. Historically, such a situation has occurred only a few times, with the most recent instance being during the COVID-19 crisis.

On June 6, 2026, at 9:19 AM, the Cointelegraph website reported that: The price of Ether (ETH) fell to $1,540 on Friday, its lowest level in 13 months. Amid pressure from a general crypto market correction, investors are becoming concerned that prices may face further downsides following increasingly negative signals from the derivatives market and security concerns arising from the discovery of a major bug in the Zcash network.

Data from the futures market shows that the funding rate for Ether Perpetual Futures contracts turned negative for the first time in several months, reflecting a clear increase in demand for short positions. Even though the price of ETH has fallen more than 67% from its all-time high in August 2025, bullish investor sentiment remains heavily impacted after leveraged long positions totaling over $1.28 billion were forced closed (liquidation) in just five days.

Meanwhile, the options market reflected similar concerns, with investors rushing to buy put options, contracts used to hedge against price declines. This caused the put-to-call premium on the Deribit platform to surge to 3.7 times, an unusually high level indicating that the market is prioritizing downside risk over price recovery.

Another factor weighing on confidence is the decline in the Total Value Locked (TVL) of assets on the Ethereum network, which has fallen to its lowest level since February 2567, reflecting a significant outflow of users and funds from decentralized applications (DApps).

Data from DefiLlama indicates that several leading DApps on Ethereum are experiencing a sharp decline in TVL (TVL), including Spark (down 50%), Ether.fi (down 49%), EigenCloud (down 41%), and KernelDAO (down 39%). This directly impacts the revenue of the Ethereum ecosystem and the demand for ETH as fuel for smart contracts.

This pressure intensified after researchers discovered a critical bug in the Zcash network that allowed for the unlimited creation of ZEC coins. The bug was discovered on May 29th using Anthropic's Opus 4.8 AI model, even though the flaw had existed in the system since 2565 without being detected.

This incident has raised concerns among investors that other blockchains and smart contracts may also have undiscovered vulnerabilities, especially in an era where AI tools are becoming increasingly capable of detecting technical errors.

Security concerns have intensified after the crypto industry suffered hacking attacks totaling over $630 million in April alone. The largest incidents were the KelpDAO attack, which caused $293 million in losses, and the Drift Protocol attack, which resulted in another $280 million in damages, accounting for over 82% of the total losses in that month.

These attacks occurred across several major networks, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Sui, and PulseChain, causing widespread concern in the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry.

However, amidst the negative atmosphere, there is one piece of data that some analysts see as a potential positive long-term sign. Data from Glassnode indicates that only 30% of the total ETH supply is currently in a profitable position compared to the last price movement of the coin.

Historically, such situations have occurred only a few times, most recently during the COVID-19 crisis in March 2563 and before that in December 2019. Both occasions were followed by a strong price recovery, particularly in 2019 when ETH surged 118% in just 60 days.

However, in the short term, the market has not yet shown clear signs of recovery after over $500 million worth of ETH long positions were forcibly closed within 48 hours. Meanwhile, Bitmine, one of the world's largest Ether holders, is facing unrealized losses of up to $10,500 billion from its ETH holdings, representing approximately 4.5% of the total supply in the system.

Analysts believe that if investor confidence does not recover and concerns about the security of DeFi systems continue to rise, the price of ETH could face pressure to fall below $1,550 again in the near future.

refer : cointelegraph.com

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