Ethereum price slides lower, nearing the $2,400 mark

Ethereum plummets near the $2,400 mark as the Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s fallout rocks the crypto market as more major tokens get dragged down.

According to data from crypto.news, the Ethereum price has dropped nearly 6% in the past 24 hours of trading. The second-largest token by market cap has been seeing red in the past few hours, dropping from a peak of $2,634 to as low as $2,408.

At press time, ETH (ETH) is trading hands at a price of $2,456, barely recovering from the sudden price drop at about 2:00 AM UTC. The recent Ethereum price dip has led to a sharp increase in trading activity for the token, with its daily trading volume rising by nearly 64% compared to the previous day of trading.

In the past week, ETH has gone down by more than 6%, and even more so in the past two weeks. In the last 24 days, the token has fallen by 7.4%.

Last month the token ignited optimism among traders hoping to see ETH jump towards the $3k mark, echoing Bitcoin (BTC)’s leap to a new all-time high. Throughout May, the token experienced a rally that catapulted ETH up to $2,731 on May 29.

Apparently ETH is not the only one suffering a decline. According to data from CoinGecko, the total crypto market cap has fallen nearly 4% from $4.1 trillion on June 5 to $3.29 trillion on June 6. Similar to ETH, Bitcoin is currently down by 1.2%, trading hands at $103,438.

Traders believe the fall began when ex-DOGE head and X owner Elon Musk resigned from his role and criticized the President’s recent spending bill, dubbed the Big Beautiful Bill. In a move seen as retaliation, Donald Trump revoked Jared Isaacman’s NASA nomination, a close associate of Musk.

According to data from DeFi Llama, Ethereum’s total value locked has also suffered from the price drop, falling by nearly 4% to $59.9 billion. Although it is still ahead of Solana (SOL) in terms of TVL, with Solana’s standing at only $8 billion, the ETH ecosystem has taken a harsher hit from the crypto market’s current plunge.

On the other hand, Ethereum’s on-chain fees rose two-fold compared to the beginning of June. On June 6, ETH fees amounted to $2.26 million, rising more than 100% compared to $853,320 on June 1.

Most recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that while Ethereum has a stronghold in aspects like censorship resistance and security, he admitted that Bitcoin is still ahead of them in terms of other areas.

He believes Bitcoin has an edge over Ethereum with regards to coding simplicity, less protocol changes, node count as well as its lesser dependency on remote procedure call services.