"There was a flurry of call buying and put selling after the London fork," one trading firm said.
Strong overhead resistance could limit price rallies into next week.
Ether is up 3% over the past 24 hours.
"The notion of ethereum becoming a deflationary cryptocurrency in the future is now tangible, and the effects on ethereum’s valuation could be profound," said one analyst.
Though USDT and USDC still captured the largest market share, smaller stablecoins are trying to prove that they are backed by safer assets.
Crypto traders have been hotly anticipating the upgrade while monitoring the deployment for signs of how the changes might affect the pace of new issuance of ether.
Initial support around $34K could stabilize the pullback.
Ether has rallied almost 60% in two weeks.
Digital assets like livepeer, helium and bittorent have soared in value this year despite the recent slump in cryptocurrencies.
BlockTower Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Alameda Research led the round by purchasing TRU, TrueFi’s native token.
Bulls returned to defend short-term support in bitcoin and ether.
Traders in China appear to be more concerned about the future of Huobi and OKEx.
Bitcoin buyers could maintain support above $36K.
"The EIP-1559 upgrade is overrated," one trader said.
Introducing the new list of CoinDesk 20 assets for the third quarter.