HostWETH vs ALETH — price, size and safety, side by side
WETH (Ethereum) vs ALETH (Optimism) — every figure is the freshest dated measurement we hold for that token, never a live-feed guess. Prices stamped 2026-10-17 / 2026-10-17.
WETH vs ALETH — normalized performance, 2026-09-21 to 2026-10-17T03:15:24
| WETH | ALETH | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $2.42K | $2.36K |
| Market cap | $5.41B | $20.45M |
| 24h volume | $462.86M DEX | $38.35K DEX |
| Liquidity | $902.53M | $2.21M |
| FDV | $5.39B | $4.29M |
| Holders | 3,680,746 | 4,163 |
| Age (days) | 1,727 | 1,199 |
| Safety grade | A | B |
Where they differ
- WETH measures ~264× the market cap of ALETH
- WETH measures ~408× the liquidity of ALETH
- WETH measures ~12,070× the 24h volume of ALETH
- WETH measures ~884× the holder count of ALETH
What the data says
WETH
WETH is the oldest load-bearing contract in DeFi. Deployed in December 2017 as WETH9, the contract at 0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 does exactly one thing: wrap ETH — which predates the ERC-20 standard and doesn't conform to it — into a token that does, redeemable one-for-one, instantly, by anyone, forever. It has no owner, no admin functions, no upgrade path, and no pause switch. Nearly every DEX trade, lending market, and NFT sale on Ethereum has settled through it at some point; it is less a token than a piece of the chain's plumbing.
That architecture is why the usual checklist comes back almost empty. There is no team to rug, no supply policy to abuse — WETH supply is simply however much ETH is currently deposited in the contract, minted on wrap and burned on unwrap. The failure mode people theorize about (the contract holding less ETH than WETH outstanding) would require a bug that eight-plus years of the highest-value adversarial testing in crypto has not found. HostDeFi's October 9, 2026 snapshot shows roughly $903 million of tracked pool liquidity and $73 million of daily volume on this deployment, and both understate reality — WETH is one side of thousands of pools our sample doesn't enumerate.
ALETH
ALETH at 0x3e29d3a9316dab217754d13b28646b76607c5f04 is Alchemix's ETH claim on Optimism — the ether-denominated sibling of the protocol's self-repaying dollar, a receipt whose backing is a yield-bearing ETH position. The October 9, 2026 snapshot prices a $20.5 million asset-wide market cap against a $4.3 million fully-diluted read of the local float — and that float is just 1.7 thousand claims, a small book by any measure.
Inside the small book the depth is real: $2.2 million of tracked pool liquidity reads deep against the local float, on $68.1 thousand of 24-hour volume. The record runs 1,181 days — the same vintage as its dollar sibling, both surviving deployments of a protocol that has long since gone through its hype cycle.
FAQ
Which is bigger, WETH or ALETH?
By tracked market cap: WETH (Ethereum) measures $5.41B and ALETH (Optimism) measures $20.45M — dated snapshots, not a live feed.
Which is safer, WETH or ALETH?
On the contract checks we publish: WETH (Ethereum) grades A and ALETH (Optimism) grades B. A grade is a structural check on the contract, not a promise about the asset.
How have WETH and ALETH performed over the shared window?
Between 2026-09-21 and 2026-10-17T03:15:24, the measured snapshots show WETH at −10.8% and ALETH at −10.5%.
The grade column is the one CMC's compare page cannot print — our grade is computed from the contract itself (mint/freeze authority, liquidity, holder concentration). Changes are measured over the shared window stated on the chart, 2026-09-21→2026-10-17T03:15:24; a token with fewer measured points measures a shorter span inside it.
Figures are dated on-chain snapshots, not a live feed. Safety grades are structural checks — not investment advice. Free · no signup · a HostDeFi product.