Bitcoin rose 44% in the quarter that closed in September, and that still left it second. Ethereum beat it. Ether jumped 71% over the same three months, and the gap between those two returns is the cleanest thing to say about how crypto traded this summer. ## Ethereum's 71% quarter beat Bitcoin's 44%
| Asset | Q3 2026 gain |
|---|---|
| --- | --- |
| Ethereum (ETH) | 71% |
| Bitcoin (BTC) | 44% |
Bitcoin.com, which published the quarter's numbers, called Bitcoin's return the second-best of any major coin. Both figures are quarterly rather than year to date, and neither one tells you what the coin did inside the quarter. Money moved alongside the prices.
Cathie Wood's ARK Venture Fund, a $1.3 billion pool, now holds stakes in SpaceX and OpenAI that can be moved on a blockchain, BeInCrypto reported. Tokenized fund shares are a plumbing change, not a headline, until enough of them exist that nobody notices the plumbing anymore.
The $2,540 retest decides what happens next
Ethereum's road to $3,000 runs straight through a price it has already traded at. Coinspeaker makes the case that a retest of $2,540 is the thing to watch. Either the level holds and sidelined buyers come back in, or it doesn't and the quarter looks like a pause in a larger move.
A retest, by the way, just means the market came back to a price it recently traded at. It matters because a level that holds on the way back up tends to attract the people who sat out the first move. CryptoPotato agrees on the target and disagrees about timing.
Its analysis has Ethereum eyeing $3,000 while flagging real hurdles in the way, and it names no date for the crossing. So two sources point at the same round number, and one of them is warning you the road isn't flat.
Lido's governance vote lands on the main chain
Lido's Vote #214 passed, and it moves the protocol's dual governance system onto the Ethereum mainnet, Bitcoinist reported. Dual governance is the setup where a vote can pass one way and a second group still has to sign off before anything actually changes.
Until now both halves of that lived off-chain, which is a polite way of saying the decision existed in a forum post or a spreadsheet rather than on the blockchain itself. Moving it on-chain puts the argument in a public ledger anyone can read. Nobody has to take the outcome on trust anymore.
This is governance plumbing, so it won't show up in a price chart this month. It decides who can change the rules later, and that's the part worth watching.
Kalshi denies a CFTC probe into ether perps
Kalshi, a prediction market company, says the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is not investigating it over unusual trading in ether perpetual swaps. CryptoDaily reported the denial. Perpetual swaps are contracts that track a price and settle continuously, with no expiration date.
A denial is not the same thing as a closed file, and CryptoDaily didn't report what prompted the question in the first place. What it did report is Kalshi saying no.
Had there been an open probe, that would outweigh a quarter's returns by a lot, so the thing to watch is whether the denial stays quiet. The number that resolves Ethereum's story is $2,540. Hold it on a pullback and the $3,000 call stays in play.
Lose it and the 71% quarter starts to read as a rally that got ahead of itself.