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Ethereum ETFs notch eight straight days of inflows, longest streak since start of October

And BitMine, the largest ethereum treasury company, acquired 101,627 ethereum tokens last week, worth $234.8 million.

Sage D. Young

Ethereum ETFs, TradFi’s mechanism to gain exposure to the second-largest cryptocurrency, have recorded eight consecutive days of inflows, totaling $493.7 million. 

The ongoing streak is the longest since September 29 to October 8, when the price of ethereum jumped from $4,215 to $4,527, data from SoSoValue shows. But after that, the price of ethereum slid and hasn’t neared the $4,000 level since the end of October. 

The inflows come as BitMine Immersion Technologies registered its highest pace of buys since last year, acquiring 101,627 ethereum tokens last week, worth $234.8 million at current prices. The firm, the second-largest cryptocurrency treasury company behind bitcoin giant Strategy, now owns more than 4% of the total ethereum supply, albeit at a 10-figure unrealized loss.

Meanwhile, users have pulled $10.5 billion from ethereum’s total value locked in the DeFi ecosystem since the weekend, when a protocol on the network suffered a $290 million exploit, likely at the hands of the DPRK’s Lazarus Group. 

What’s clear now is that even the most established DeFi protocols have a target on their back, according to Lukas Schor, president of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation. Cybersecurity has always been a cat-and-mouse game... We, as an industry, have to level up our defenses. Otherwise, trust in DeFi will be very quickly and irrecoverably eroded, Schor told Sherwood News.

What’s next for ethereum’s price action? Well, market participants have been making extreme forecast swings in both directions: pro-ethereum Wall Street startup Etherealize outlined its case for ethereum to reach $250,000, while Ansem, a popular crypto figure on X, is more bearish, posting that traders can short ethereum to close under $1,000 by the end of the year. 

Prediction market-implied odds of ethereum setting a yearly low under $1,000 stands at 21%, compared to a 64% chance the 2026 low for the token is under $1,750. On the bullish side, traders have placed a 44% probability the token climbs above $3,500 and a 14% chance it goes above $6,000 by 2026.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.) 

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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