Last month, CoinDesk reported that big money is becoming increasingly bullish on ether ETH, with price charts indicating a potential rally above $3,000.

New evidence has now emerged, supporting those claims.

On Thursday, a trader paid a premium of over $2 million to purchase a total of 61,000 contracts of June-end expiry ether call options at strikes $3,200 and $3,400, according to data source crypto options exchange Deribit.

Theoretically, the $3,200 call is a bet that ether’s price will rise from the current $2,460 to over $3,200 by the end of the month. The purchase of the $3,400 call indicates expectations for a move above that level.

In other words, the trader anticipates a price surge of over 30% in three weeks.

A call option gives the purchaser the right but not the obligation to buy the underlying asset at a predetermined price at a later date.

A call buyer is implicitly bullish on the market and pays a premium for the asymmetric upside exposure. The premium paid, in this case, $2 million, is the maximum amount the buyer stands to lose in case the market doesn’t rise as expected.

Stars align for bulls

The bullish flow is consistent with the renewed optimism among some analysts about ether’s price prospects.

According to Youwei Yang, Ph.D., chief economist at BIT Mining, protocol upgrades, institutional moves, and anticipation around new financial products have all come together to restore investor confidence in ether.

Ether’s parent blockchain, Ethereum, recently implemented the Pectra upgrade to enhance scalability, validator flexibility, and user experience, introducing key features like EIP-7702 to enable regular wallets to leverage smart contract capabilities.

«The Pectra upgrade, which went live on May 7, has been a key turning point. By raising the validator cap from 32 to 2,048 ETH and doubling blob throughput, Ethereum took a major step forward in both staking efficiency and Layer-2 scalability,» Yang said in an email to CoinDesk.

«It’s a clear signal that the network is serious about scaling and improving its core infrastructure. That’s the kind of technical progress that brings not just developers, but also users and capital, back into the ecosystem,» Yang added.

Yang cited SharpLink Gaming’s announcement that it would move $425 million into Ethereum as a treasury reserve asbold endorsement of ether as the corporate Treasury asset.

«It reminds us of the early wave of Bitcoin treasury adoption by corporates, and it could be just the beginning of something similar for ETH,» Yang noted.

Lastly, speaking of institutional adoption, speculation has been circulating that U.S. regulators will soon approve a spot ether ETF with a staking mechanism, opening doors for institutions to take exposure to both the price and the staking yield, a feature missing in BTC ETFs.

Read more: Ether Favored Over Bitcoin by Big Money, Here Are 3 Clues That Point to ETH Bias in Crypto Market