Each quarter compounds its three months — the coarsest grain that still shows a cycle turning inside a single year.
This page compresses Ethereum (ETH)'s history into four cells per year — Q1 through Q4 — coarse enough to watch a cycle turn inside a single year. ETH's quarters track the ETH/BTC rotation: its strongest quarters stack in risk-on stretches when the ratio climbs, and its weak ones arrive when capital rotates back into Bitcoin. Reading this grid next to Bitcoin's quarterly page makes those rotation phases easy to spot.
Each quarter compounds its three calendar months from UTC daily closes, so a cell is what a position held through those months would actually have returned. ETH's data starts at its perpetual listing in November 2019. That window frames Ethereum's modern era — DeFi summer 2020, the 2021 double-peak, the 2022 unwind and the ETF-era regime after it.
Ethereum is down 6.6% quarter-to-date in Q4 2026, compounding October through the daily close of 10 October 2026 (UTC). The figure keeps moving until the quarter closes.
Ethereum returned +70.8% in Q3 2026, its most recent completed quarter, compounding that quarter's three monthly returns. The median Q3 return on record is +4.2%, so it came in above the norm.
Ethereum's 2026 quarters so far: Q1 −29.2%, Q2 −25.3%, Q3 +70.8%, Q4 −6.6% (in progress). Compounded together they put Ethereum down 15.5% year-to-date.
2025: Q1 −45.4%, Q2 +36.4%, Q3 +66.8%, Q4 −28.3%. The strongest quarter was Q3 at +66.8% and the weakest Q1 at −45.4%; the full year compounded to −11.0%.
Across 11 completed Q4s on record, the median Q4 return for Ethereum is +22.6%. The best Q4 was 2017 at +151.0%, the worst 2018 at −42.7%, and 6 of 11 closed positive. The current Q4 is excluded until it closes.
By median return across all completed years, Q4 has been Ethereum's strongest quarter at +22.6% and Q3 its weakest at +4.2%. Q1 +6.1%, Q2 +9.4%, Q3 +4.2%, Q4 +22.6% are the four medians; they shift as each new year is added.
Across 45 completed quarters, Ethereum's best was Q1 2016 at +1,122% and its worst Q3 2015 at −73.9%. 28 of 45 quarters closed positive.
Loosely. The broad risk-on quarters often match, but ETH regularly diverges when the ETH/BTC ratio trends — some of its best quarters arrived while Bitcoin's cell for the same quarter was ordinary.
ETH's history here begins at its first daily perpetual-futures candle on Binance in November 2019, so the grid starts with the first quarter completed after that date. All medians are computed from that point on.
Because returns compound. A +10% month followed by a −10% month leaves −1%, not 0%. The quarterly figure multiplies the monthly factors together, which is the return a held position would actually see.