Ether gains 4.22 percent, Glamsterdam clients are due today: Hoodi forks on October 26

Ether trades at $2,451.86, or 2,182 euros, on Friday morning. That is 4.22 percent more than 24 hours earlier, and more than double what Bitcoin added over the same period (1.76 percent). The rise did not come from the funds but from direct trading: America's Ether ETFs lost $60.22 million on Thursday, their second consecutive trading day of outflows. The one documented date in the Ethereum calendar today sits with the core developers: client releases for the Glamsterdam upgrade are due today, and on Monday, October 26, the last public testnet switches over.

Ether at $2,451: 4.22 percent in 24 hours, Bitcoin only 1.76

The day's range was wide. The low was $2,324.97 and the high $2,463.31; just under six percent separates the two. Trading volume reached $14.30 billion and the market valuation $299.19 billion. Ether remains the market's number two, and it also remains 50.43 percent below its record of $4,946.05, which the price reached on August 24, 2025.

The daily gain does little to the weekly picture. Over seven days the reading is a loss of 1.52 percent, over 14 days a loss of 9.86 percent. Only over 60 days does the sign turn clearly positive, at 29.17 percent. Holding since the start of the month leaves you up 1.91 percent; holding for a year leaves you down 38.66 percent.

On Thursday morning this page carried a piece on a price of $2,380 and a market breadth of 17 losers among the top 20. Two things have changed since. The price is around three percent higher, and market breadth has turned. Of the 21 largest currencies excluding stablecoins, a single one is now down, and seven are up by more than five percent. The $2,400 level, still in question on Thursday, has held and now sits below the price.

Glamsterdam on Hoodi: the October 26 fork date and today's client deadline

Glamsterdam is the next planned upgrade to the Ethereum network. An upgrade of this kind is called a hard fork: every machine that runs the network has to move to new software at the same moment, or it no longer follows the same blockchain. That is tested beforehand on testnets, replicas of the network in which the money has no value.

At the ACDE #247 developer call on October 8, the core developers fixed two dates. First, client releases for Hoodi are expected by Friday, October 16, and Glamsterdam is to go live on Hoodi on Monday, October 26, the second and last public testnet. Second, the developers recorded that the increase in the block gas limit to 200 million happens at the fork transition itself, not later.

The first public testnet, Sepolia, is already through the transition: Glamsterdam went live there on October 6. A mainnet date, by contrast, has not been decided. A date for the mainnet fork read anywhere over the coming days is a proposal, not a decision.

For investors, the gap between the two dates is the real news. Ten days separate the software release from the testnet switch. That is the window in which it becomes clear whether the clients work together under load, and it is why a mainnet date is only to be expected afterwards.

Gas limit of 200 million: what the fork transition changes

The gas limit is the ceiling on how much computing work fits into a block. The higher it sits, the more transactions go through per block, and the cheaper usage generally becomes. Mainnet currently works with a limit of 60 million gas per block. The most recently built block, number 26,203,424, was barely half full at 28.67 million gas, and the base fee stood at 0.0666 Gwei.

The base fee is the minimum price per unit of gas that the protocol itself sets. At 0.0666 Gwei a simple Ether transfer costs fractions of a cent. It only becomes expensive once blocks fill up, and a higher limit works against exactly that.

At 200 million gas, capacity would be more than three times today's figure. That is no guarantee of lower fees, because more room also attracts more use. What it reliably changes is the load on the machines that run the network: larger blocks need more memory and more bandwidth. That is precisely why the developers test Sepolia first, then Hoodi, before mainnet follows.

EIP-8061 changes the exit churn: 1,098 Ether per epoch instead of 256

One of the changes sits directly on stakers' money. EIP-8061, titled “Increase exit and consolidation churn”, currently sits at Last Call status with a deadline of November 1, 2026. Churn is the speed at which validators are allowed to enter and leave the network; an epoch covers 32 block slots and so a good six minutes.

Exits have so far faced a fixed ceiling of 256 Ether per epoch. The proposal removes that ceiling and ties exits to the total amount staked: at 36 million Ether staked, that would be around 1,098 Ether per epoch. The 256 Ether limit stays in place for entries, and consolidating validators gets its own ceiling of around 549 Ether per epoch. The proposal names the price itself: the period during which a newly started machine has to trust the network without checking for itself falls from about 15.7 days to about seven days.

Stakers who go through a service notice none of this at the surface. Those who stake directly, or who want out through a provider, notice it in the waiting time.

The exit queue stands at 1,030,696 Ether: 17 days and 21 hours of waiting

How long that wait runs today can be read publicly. The exit queue holds 1,030,696 Ether with an estimated wait of 17 days and 21 hours. The entry queue holds 1,292,455 Ether, where the wait runs to 22 days and 11 hours. There are 834,645 active validators.

In dollars, at today's price, around $2.5 billion sits in the exit queue. For holders, that means a decision to leave staking today is not a sale today. The Ether only becomes available to sell in a good two and a half weeks, and at what price is decided between now and then.

This is where EIP-8061 would bite. With the new ceiling, the exit queue would clear considerably faster. It is not decided for mainnet, though, and today's limits apply until the Hoodi fork on October 26. If you need liquidity in that period, plan with the 17 days, not with the reform.

The long queue has one advantage: it also brakes any sudden selling pressure out of staking. More than a million Ether cannot reach the market within days, even if everyone involved wanted it to.

ETF outflows of $60.22 million: the funds are not carrying the recovery

While the price rose, money flowed out of the funds. On SoSoValue data summarised by TokenPost, America's spot Ether ETFs lost a net $60.22 million on October 15, their second consecutive trading day of outflows. BlackRock's ETHA carried the largest outflow at $44.39 million, followed by Grayscale's ETHE at $18.28 million. Fidelity's FETH was alone in taking money in, at $2.44 million.

Total assets under management across the funds stand at $15.29 billion, or about 5.10 percent of Ether's market valuation. Trading volume in the fund shares reached $773.15 million, of which $611.96 million sat in ETHA alone.

That leaves a sober reading of the daily gain. The recovery did not come from institutional money on the fund route. Whether the developer calendar triggered the buying is not established, and it cannot be read out of the figures either. All that is established is that the two fell on the same day.

$2.67 billion in open leveraged positions: longs pay in 166 of 234 markets

The futures market shows how the advance is financed. Ether perpetuals on the Hyperliquid exchange carry $2.67 billion in open interest; only Bitcoin carries more, at $3.39 billion. The funding rate is positive, and it is positive broadly: in 166 of 234 markets, buyers on credit pay the sellers, and in twelve markets it runs the other way.

The funding rate is the payment that tethers a perpetual contract to the spot price: when it is positive, bets on rising prices dominate, and that side pays. It is no alarm signal as long as the rate stays small, and it is small. What it does tell you is where forced selling sits in the event of a pullback, namely on the buyers' side.

These figures rest on Hyperliquid's public market data, 234 perpetual contracts, together with the most recently built block on the Ethereum blockchain. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on October 16, 2026.

Client version and exit deadline: how to check where you stand before October 26

For the great majority of readers, a testnet fork calls for nothing at all. If your Ether sits with an exchange or a custodian, that firm handles the software. Three points still count.

If you run a node yourself

The rule here is the one that applies at every fork: both programmes have to be current, the execution client and the consensus client. A machine that updates only one of the two drops out of the blockchain at the transition. Today's releases are intended for exactly this, and the ten days to October 26 are the window for installing them.

If you stake through a provider

What matters here is the exit queue, not the fork. If you want access to your staked capital in the coming weeks, plan for the 17 days. A look at the terms is worth it in any case: the staking platforms compared differ markedly in fees, minimum amounts and notice periods.

If you trade with leverage

A fork date is a date on which news clusters, and so a date of heightened volatility. Holding a leveraged position across October 26 means measuring the distance to liquidation against the daily low of $2,324.97 rather than against the current price.

MiCA route to buying, the tax allowance and the holding period: what applies in Germany

Buying Ether in Germany has been tied to authorised providers since the EU's MiCA regulation. In practice: the exchange or broker you buy through needs an EU licence, and that licence is publicly verifiable. Buy at an unlicensed provider and you lose the regulation's protection, and in a dispute the straightforward legal route.

For tax, the one-year rule still governs private sales. Sell Ether more than a year after buying and the gain is tax-free; sell within the year and the gain is taxable as a private disposal, to the extent that it exceeds the 1,000 euro annual allowance together with other such gains. Staking income is governed by its own rules, and their classification is disputed in detail; settle that before the tax return.

Record-keeping matters, and from the outset. Buying, selling and staking across several providers only adds up to a defensible one-year rule with clean records.

Levels above and below: $2,325, $2,463 and the $2,500 line

On the downside, the daily low of $2,324.97 is the first level with evidence behind it; that is where the price turned overnight. Below it, the daily gain is given back, and the next orientation comes only from the zone around $2,300, out of which the price climbed in the night.

On the upside, the daily high sits at $2,463.31, only a few dollars above the current reading. Behind it comes the $2,500 line. It is more than a round number: above it the price stood before the 14-day decline of 9.86 percent began, and only beyond it would that decline be recovered.

What would have to carry the daily gain over the coming days can be named: fund inflows instead of outflows, a smooth Hoodi fork on October 26, and a mainnet date after it. Without all three, this stays a recovery inside a falling week.

Ethereum before Hoodi: the client must be current by October 26

In short, this was a day on which the price ran ahead and fund money lagged, with a hard date in the calendar. Three concrete steps follow from it.

1. Check the route to buying. Compare which licensed platform lets you buy Ether at what cost, before volatility forces a quick decision: the crypto exchanges compared.
2. Recalculate the leverage. Trading on margin means checking the distance to liquidation against $2,324.97 and the cost of the funding rate: the perp DEX platforms compared.
3. Record the holding period. Note the date and amount of every purchase so the one-year rule stays provable: the tax tools and portfolio trackers compared.

(As of October 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)