Ether ended July up 57%, far outpacing bitcoin’s rebound

On July 31, 2022, ether finished CryptoCompare’s July measurement window at $1,680, up 57.0% for the month. Bitcoin ended the same provider-defined window at $23,308, up 17.1%. The divergence made Ethereum’s native asset the clearest large-cap winner in a broad rebound: XRP, cardano and solana also posted positive July returns in CryptoCompare’s covered set, but none matched ether.

The result mattered because it interrupted months of severe losses without erasing them. CryptoCompare still measured ether down 54.3% for 2022 through July 31 and down 38.4% over three months. Bitcoin was down 49.5% for the year and 38.1% over three months. July therefore supplied evidence of a forceful rebound, not proof that the digital-asset contraction had ended.

A rebound with different risk profiles

CryptoCompare placed ether’s July-end market capitalization at $205 billion and bitcoin’s at $445 billion. Its reported 30-day volatility was 108% for ether and 62.1% for bitcoin. Those are annualized volatility measures in the data provider’s report, not probabilities of loss or forecasts. They show that ether’s larger return arrived with substantially larger observed price variation.

The market had no single official closing auction. Crypto assets traded continuously across venues, and a “July return” depended on the selected exchange inputs, currency pairs, aggregation method and cut-off. CryptoCompare’s end-of-month figures are therefore an attributable market-data series rather than universal settlement prices. Reuters independently described bitcoin’s gain as more than 17% and ether’s as 57%, identifying the performances as bitcoin’s strongest month since October 2021 and ether’s strongest since January 2021.

Broader conditions also argued against reading one green month as a durable turn. CryptoCompare’s separate investment-products review, using data through July 26 for several measures, put total assets under management across covered digital-asset products at $25.9 billion, up 16.9% from the end of June. Yet it measured average daily aggregate product volume at $122 million, down 44.6% and the lowest since September 2020. Rising prices and assets under management were accompanied by thin product turnover.

The Merge entered the market narrative

Ethereum’s planned transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake was an important part of July’s narrative. Public Ethereum developer records showed active preparation: the Sepolia test network had completed its Merge in early July, and core-developer planning centered on the Goerli testnet as the next major rehearsal. A September 19 mainnet date circulated as a planning target, not a final activation commitment.

That distinction was material on July 31. The test program reduced some execution uncertainty, but a completed testnet did not guarantee the main network’s timing or success. The official mainnet terminal-total-difficulty parameters had not yet been announced. It is reasonable to identify improving Merge expectations as one contributor to ether’s relative strength; the price record alone cannot establish how much of the 57.0% return the upgrade narrative caused.

Macro conditions offered another plausible explanation. Reuters reported that the rally moved alongside risk assets as traders considered whether weakening economic activity could slow the Federal Reserve’s tightening campaign. That was contemporaneous market interpretation, not a demonstrated causal allocation between monetary-policy expectations and Ethereum-specific demand.

What July 31 established

The verified conclusion is narrow: under CryptoCompare’s methodology, ether outperformed bitcoin by 39.9 percentage points in July 2022, calculated as 57.0% minus 17.1%. Both remained sharply negative for 2022 through July 31, and ether remained the more volatile asset in the provider’s 30-day measure.

Later context

Ethereum completed the Merge on September 15, 2022. That later result confirms what the July development work was preparing for, but it does not convert July’s tentative schedule into a certainty or prove that the July rally correctly priced the outcome.