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Happy first birthday, ethereum ETFs

As the funds celebrate their first anniversary, they have finally started to pick up momentum.

7/22/25 12:59PM

July 23 marks one year since the SEC approved ethereum ETFs, and these funds now hold $15.7 billion in assets under management. While they had a sluggish start, the pace has picked up recently, buoyed by several factors including the GENIUS Act’s passage.

Nic Roberts-Huntley, CEO and cofounder of Blueprint Finance, told Sherwood News that ethereum ETFs have had a more measured first year compared to bitcoin’s explosive launch in January 2024, reflecting the complexity of ethereum’s value proposition rather than fundamental weakness.

In their first week of trading, ethereum ETFs suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in outflows. In contrast, bitcoin ETFs saw more than $1 billion in inflows in their first few days of trading, Farside Investors data shows.

“The institutional adoption pattern we’re seeing is actually logical — firms are starting with bitcoin as their digital asset entry point, then expanding into ethereum as they understand the infrastructure layer,” Roberts-Huntley said.

The week before their first birthday, ethereum ETFs saw record inflows, attracting $726.6 million on July 16, $600 million on July 17, and a record $2.12 billion in inflows for the full week, nearly double its previous record of $1.2 billion.

Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, told Sherwood that ethereum will benefit greatly from the regulatory clarity surrounding stablecoins and the growth in tokenization.

The stablecoin market cap stands at $262 billion, and stablecoins on the ethereum blockchain take the lion’s share with a $130 billion market cap, per DefiLlama data.

“We are seeing very strong institutional investor appetite as they better understand ethereum’s opportunity, and demand could result in $10 billion net inflows during the second half of 2025,” Leon said.

Ethereum, the second-largest crypto at a $450 billion market cap, has been on a roll lately, up 22% in the past week.

David LaValle, global head of ETFs at Grayscale, told Sherwood News that as ethereum ETFs celebrate their first anniversary, there is an increase in several key performance metrics, including client engagement, trading volumes, and fund flows, which suggests the investors are looking beyond bitcoin as they consider an allocation to crypto.

“Looking ahead, we anticipate continued ethereum ETP adoption, particularly as the market matures and ethereum’s use cases like tokenization and DeFi gain more traction,” LaValle said.

The most successful ethereum ETF is iShares Ethereum Trust ETF, with $9.6 billion in assets under management.

Following BlackRock, the other funds rounding out the top five are:

Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF, with $3.4 billion in assets under management.
Fidelity Ethereum Fund, with $1.3 billion in assets under management.
Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust ETF, with $1.3 billion in assets under management.
Bitwise Ethereum ETF, with $496 million in assets under management.

Looking ahead

Another factor that could boost ethereum ETFs even higher is whether the SEC allows staking within the funds, a change many firms and crypto insiders have supported for some time. Staking involves locking up coins and earning rewards in return for helping to secure the blockchain.

Currently, staking within US spot ethereum ETFs isn’t allowed, meaning investors may lose out on revenue opportunities if they choose to park their cash in ethereum ETFs, but this could change soon.

Recently, Nasdaq — on BlackRock’s behalf — filed an amended application with the SEC to add staking to the iShares Ethereum Trust.

Jason Linehan, VP of strategy at SharpLink Gaming, which recently became the world’s largest corporate ethereum holder and now has 360,800 tokens, told Sherwood that ethereum ETFs still have work to do to realize the full potential of ethereum as an investment.

“We hope that regulators will soon be able to approve staked ETH ETFs so that more investors can benefit from the native staking yield that ethereum offers. This will also put the billions in ETH ETFs capital to work, making the ethereum platform even safer and more secure, increasing its economic bandwidth, making it more attractive for stablecoin and tokenized RWA issuers,” Linehan said.

Blueprint Finance’s Roberts-Huntley echoed the sentiment, saying that staking-enabled ETFs will be the real unlock and that the current products are just the foundation.

“Once institutions can access both price appreciation and network rewards through a regulated wrapper, that changes the entire institutional conversation around productive digital assets,” Roberts-Huntley said.

Sage D. Young8h

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.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

10h

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

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:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“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 that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.