Ethereum climbed to its highest level in over a month, briefly touching $2,200 on Friday. The price swing comes amidst a new change among ETFs focused on the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. 

Yesterday, ETHB — BlackRock’s iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF Shares — started trading on Nasdaq, making the investment vehicle the first from the financial titan to include staking, the process of locking up tokens to help secure the network’s consensus mechanism in exchange for rewards. 

The nascent staking ETF has nearly $150 million in net assets, drawing in $43.5 million in inflows on its first day, data from SoSoValue shows. “Pretty good start for any ETF,” Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart noted in a social media post.

While ETHB is BlackRock’s first ethereum staking ETF, it’s not first to market. The Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF launched in 2024, while the REX-Osprey ETH Staking ETF rolled out last year. 

Ethereum ETFs have seen nearly $157.7 million of inflows in March, on track to record their first monthly inflow since October. 

Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation published its mandate, “a document that serves as part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide for the Ethereum Foundation,” on Friday. 

“Our Mandate to EF states what must be cherished to protect the ultimate reason for Ethereum’s existence: user self-sovereignty,” the Ethereum Foundation Board wrote. “To be a part of EF, our own teams must remember that Ethereum must, above all, remain censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS).”

The mandate is a new chapter in how the organization views its position in the world, according to ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. “We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as  maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community,” Buterin said. “This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies.”

President Trump’s meme coin has risen 54.6% in the last 24 hours to trade at a more than one-month high. The token’s price performance is outpacing an overall rise throughout the wider crypto industry, boosting its total market capitalization 4.3%.

What’s driving it? Something we’ve seen before: on Thursday, GetTrumpMemes announced that the top 297 holders of $TRUMP will have the opportunity to attend a gala luncheon next month at Mar-a-Lago, where the president will be a keynote speaker.

Last year a similar competition was announced, and the top $TRUMP whales attended a dinner with him at the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, DC, drawing supporters, critics, and protestors to the event.

Despite the recent spike, the cryptocurrency is down 94.2% from its all-time high of $73.43, set the day before Trump’s inauguration last year, when it topped a $70 billion valuation.

Stablecoin transaction volume on solana climbed to a record $650 billion last month, more than double the network’s previous record. It also saw the highest volume of any blockchain last month, according to a Wednesday note published by Grayscale Head of Research Zach Pandl.

“Stablecoins are one of the megatrends driving adoption of blockchain technology, and Solana is well positioned to compete in this category,” Pandl wrote.

The research note comes as the supply of stablecoins on solana has jumped to $15.4 billion, a substantial leap since the start of 2025, when the figure sat at $5.1 billion, data from open-source analytics platform DefiLlama shows. 

The price of solana has increased 7.3% in the last 24 hours to return above the $90 level, outpacing bitcoin, ethereum, and dogecoin, per CoinGecko.

International banking group Standard Chartered has predicted solana will grow to $250 by the end of 2026, pointing to a shift in activity from meme coins to solana-stablecoin pairs, aided by AI-driven micropayments.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City approved a limited purpose account for Kraken Financial, making the exchange the first cryptocurrency company to gain access to the Fed’s payment infrastructure, according to a Wednesday report from The Wall Street Journal. 

The approval “marks the convergence of crypto infrastructure and sovereign financial rails,” according to Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi. With a Federal Reserve master account, Kraken can directly connect to core US payment systems used by traditional banks and credit unions, enabling faster and more efficient fiat movement for Kraken’s institutional clients.

Sethi continued, “This creates a uniquely resilient foundation. It gives us the ability to settle directly on Fedwire, reduce dependency on correspondent banks, and integrate regulated fiat liquidity directly into digital asset markets.”

The approval of a Fed master account comes as Kraken, which was founded in 2011, is preparing for an initial public offering.

Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmid in a press release said the payments landscape is actively evolving. “Throughout this transformation, the integrity and stability of the U.S. payments system remain our priority,” Schmid said.

Investors appear to be rotating where they are placing their crypto bets, but not necessarily fleeing the asset class entirely. 

Last month, spot bitcoin ETFs registered $206.5 million in outflows, marking their fourth straight month of redemptions. Ethereum spot ETFs saw even heavier withdrawal as $369.9 million left the investment vehicles, also marking a fourth consecutive monthly outflow. 

Since November, spot bitcoin and ethereum ETFs have posted more than $9.1 billion in cumulative outflows.

Bitcoin and ethereum are the market’s virtual ATMs, according to Chris Soriano, cofounder and chief commercial officer at BridgePort. “It’s no surprise when institutions start laying off risk or meet redemptions, they naturally sell what’s most liquid first,” Soriano told Sherwood News. “This is no different than when a traditional fund manager trims S&P 500 exposure before touching their small-cap growth positions.” 

On the other hand, newer funds based on altcoins haven’t stopped recording monthly green candles. 

Spot XRP ETFs pulled in $58 million last month and have yet to post a single negative month since their launch in November. Spot solana ETFs attracted $63 million and, likewise, remain in the black since their debut in October. 

The outflows of the two largest cryptocurrencies combined with the modest inflows of the two smaller tokens suggest a rotation regime, Soriano argued. “Institutions trimming their core liquid holdings while selectively adding to high-conviction, higher-beta positions where they think there’s more juice in the squeeze. It’s not a contradiction; it’s portfolio mechanics behaving exactly as you’d expect,” Soriano continued.

He added that XRP and solana’s markets are also thinner, which means the same dollar of buying pressure registers as a louder, more persistent inflow signal than it ever would in BTC or ETH.

Nic Roberts-Huntley, CEO and cofounder of Blueprint Finance, told Sherwood that bitcoin and etheruem’s outflows combined with XRP and solana’s inflows “may signal a broader market transition, one where capital increasingly chases specific use cases rather than the entire asset class moving in lockstep.”