Investment management company VanEck on Monday introduced the first exchange-traded fund offering spot exposure to AVAX, the native token for the Avalanche blockchain and the latest cryptocurrency with an ETF. 

The new investment vehicle also aims to provide staking rewards for holders, according to the press release. AVAX, which has seen over $354 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours, is up slightly today. The token is trading at $11.70 as of 1:20 p.m. ET, a far cry from its all-time high of $144.96 in 2021. 

The nascent VanEck fund joins a group of its crypto-specific ETFs, including the firm’s bitcoin ETF, with $1.4 billion in total assets; its ethereum ETF, which holds $147.5 million; and its solana ETF, with assets totaling $27.9 million.

ETHZilla, known for its ethereum treasury, formed a new subsidiary and purchased aerospace equipment in a bid to boost the company’s tokenization efforts. 

The treasury firm, through its nascent subsidiary ETHZilla Aerospace LLC, “acquired two CFM56-7B24 aircraft engines, together with all parts, engine records and engine stands” for $12.2 million from Avean Engine Solutions, according to an 8K filing on Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The two aircraft engines are subject to lease agreements with a major airline, which were assigned to ETHZilla as part of the acquisition, the filing stated.

The firm’s top priority in 2026 is growing its real-world asset tokenization business and is keen on rolling out RWA tokens in the first quarter, an ETHZilla representative told Sherwood News at the beginning of the year. 

ETHZilla’s acquisition of two aircraft engines is part of this tokenization road map, which aims to bring real-world assets from high-value vertical markets, such as aerospace, maritime, and heavy equipment, on-chain. 

“In the heavy equipment market, we will initially focus on aerospace assets such as aircraft engines and airframes to tokenize,” ETHZilla Chairman and CEO McAndrew Rudisill said in his shareholder letter from December. “This represents a large, growing market with quality high-yielding assets, and we believe it is a very attractive space for tokenization.” 

Spot XRP ETFs are on track to notch a weekly outflow for the first time since their inception in November 2025. The week’s flows turned negative on Tuesday when the investment vehicles saw over $53 million leave the funds.

Prior to this week, spot XRP ETFs had averaged $127.5 million in weekly inflows, a figure lifted by the fund’s first day of trading, which had $243 million worth of inflows, according to SoSoValue.

The funds’ ongoing pace comes as XRP has shed nearly 20% from its 2026 high of $2.39 to trade at a lower price than when the ETFs launched. 

XRP is in “Extreme Fear” territory, per social data from blockchain analytics firm Santiment. “Small retail traders have become pessimistic toward the #5 market cap cryptocurrency after a -19% drop since the high back on January 5th,” Santiment wrote. The firm told Sherwood News, “If we reach levels of bearishness that we were seeing back on November 20-21, 2025, it would be an indication that a major bounce is likely.”

As the overall market goes risk-off amid geopolitical tensions, ethereum has decreased 7% in the last 24 hours and is basically flat for 2026.

The cryptocurrency is hovering just below $3,000, a more than 10% pullback from this year’s high of around $3,350. The recent drawdown is the sharpest in the last 24 hours among its peers. Over the same period, bitcoin is down 3.6%, XRP dipped 5.2%, solana slumped 5.6%, and dogecoin tumbled 4%. 

Meanwhile, leading ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies, which recently announced a $200 million investment into Beast Industries, acquired an additional 35,268 ethereum tokens worth $108 million last week, bringing its total to 4.2 million tokens worth nearly $12.7 billion at current prices. 

The firm also allocated 581,920 tokens for staking, ethereum’s security mechanism. Participation has been on the rise, and the entry queue to start staking is multiple times longer than the exit line.

On Wednesday, the ethereum parent chain logged its highest-ever transaction count at over 2.5 million transactions, a roughly 34% increase from 1.9 million transactions on the first day of the new year, data from blockchain analytics firm Artemis shows. 

Artemis research analyst Alex Weseley told Sherwood News the largest drivers of the network’s transaction growth stems from Circle and Tether’s stablecoins, USDC and USDT, as usage of both are up over 200% year over year. 

“It has also been interesting to see that the average transaction fee has remained low at < $0.20 per transaction, compared to the $52 average transaction fee paid when transaction counts peaked in 2021,” Weseley added.

The all-time high follows the activation of Pectra and Fusaka last year, two network upgrades aimed at enhancing the scalability of ethereum. “The changes ethereum is making to scale the L1 are starting to pay off, though we are still in the early innings,” Weseley said.

The price of ethereum has increased ~7% in the past seven days, outpacing its peers bitcoin, XRP, solana, and dogecoin. Meanwhile, spot ethereum ETFs trading in the US have seen almost $415.9 million in total inflows during the year so far, with $175 million from Wednesday alone, per SoSoValue. 

Bitcoin is having a strong start to 2026 that could see it catch up with precious metals’ rally. Bitcoin ETFs are also rallying, and saw their second consecutive day of massive inflows, recording $843.6 million on Wednesday, according to SoSoValue, bringing the total for the week to $1.7 billion.

Jake Kennis, research analyst at Nansen, told Sherwood News that a combination of easing inflation fears, geopolitical safe haven demand, stronger ETF inflows, and a technical breakout above $94,000 to $96,000 resistance are all converging to push BTC toward $100,000.

“The rally has solid institutional and onchain backing, but elevated leverage in futures markets and profit-taking by top traders near the $97K–$100K psychological resistance could trigger volatility,” Kennis said.

While bitcoin has retreated after nearing key resistance levels, Timot Lamarre, director of market research at Unchained, said that despite the asset having been well off all-time highs, it is set up for a sustainable run above $100,000.

“Institutions continue to open up bitcoin buying opportunities to new pools of capital, the macro environment continues to move toward significant monetary easing, and governments, companies, and individuals continue to increase their bitcoin stockpiles,” he said.

The analytics team at B2BINPAY echoed the sentiment, saying that the market structure remains bullish, “with potential to reach $100–105K in the coming weeks, potentially reaching the $120K–140K range later in 2026 if demand stays in place.” 

A failure would likely mean a pullback to the $88,000 to $90,000 range, where liquidity is already concentrated, they said.

“Another crucial marker is leverage. Funding rates and open interest are far from extreme, with total OI at around $65B. That’s high. Yet, it’s still below the prior record/near-record zone seen in 2025, around $72B–$75B. So the market isn’t stretched,” the analysts said.

Not content with generating money through digital assets, BitMine Immersion Technologies is also attempting to cash in on another largely incorporeal industry: the attention spans of young people.

The ethereum treasury company announced a $200 million equity investment into Beast Industries, the holding company for the various ventures of YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast. While most of these operations revolve around digital content, we’d be remiss not to note that this also includes Feastables.

“MrBeast and Beast Industries, in our view, is the leading content creator of our generation, with a reach and engagement unmatched with GenZ, GenAlpha and Millennials,” said BitMine Chairman Tom Lee. “Beast Industries is the largest and most innovative creator based platform in the world and our corporate and personal values are strongly aligned.”

Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold added that the company was looking forward to “exploring ways to further collaborate and incorporate DeFi into our upcoming financial services platform.”

However, in my personal view this is hardly the most eye-catching collaboration MrBeast has been involved with in the past 24 hours...