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Bye bye bye

Ethereum spot ETFs see second-largest daily outflow of almost $200 million

Meanwhile, the exit queue for ethereum validators has set a new record at 911,718 tokens — worth about $3.9 billion.

Sage D. Young

After seeing a record amount of inflows last week, US spot ethereum ETFs have reversed course and had the second-largest daily outflow on Monday, with $196.6 million exiting the funds. Most of the total, 84%, left BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF and Fidelity’s Ethereum Fund.  

Despite the outflows, the cumulative amount of ethereum tokens held in ETFs stands at more than 6.5 million or $28 billion, representing nearly 5.4% of the total supply for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. In comparison, treasury entities hold 4.1 million ethereum tokens worth about $17.6 billion, per StrategicETHReserve.xyz

Amid the outflows, prominent treasury firm SharpLink Gaming, chaired by ethereum cofounder Joseph Lubin, announced purchasing an additional 143,593 tokens at an average entry price of $4,648 for the week ending August 17. SharpLink’s most recent acquisition level is about 10% higher than ethereum’s current price, which is stuck around $4,200 as of 12 p.m. ET.

The Minneapolis-based firm now holds 740,760 ethereum tokens worth roughly $3.2 billion. The company also raised $536.5 million in net proceeds through its at-the-market facility and a registered direct offering, according to Tuesday press release.

Ethereums validator exit queue is the longest ever

Meanwhile, the exit queue for validators has set a new all-time high of 911,718 ethereum tokens, equating to about $3.9 billion. The wait time for the exit to clear stands at 15 days and 20 hours. The figures are a substantial jump from seven days ago, when the exit line had 567,700 ethereum tokens waiting. 

Preston Van Loon, an ethereum protocol developer, said on X, “The exit queue prevents a mass validator exodus. Without it, validators could rush to exit during a detected or anticipated attack on Ethereums consensus, weakening the networks economic security when its most needed.” 

Van Loon added, “The validator queue ensures economic security, which is the cost to attack or manipulate a protocol, mainly determined by the total ETH staked. More staked ETH increases attack costs.”

The number of staked ethereum tokens actively securing the network hasn’t seen much volatility, as the balance has remained above 35 million tokens since the middle of June, blockchain data shows

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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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