Crypto
Jockey horse race art nouveau illustration
(Getty Images)

Spot ethereum ETFs outpace bitcoin ETF inflows

In August, spot bitcoin ETFs had only five days of inflows that were greater than ethereum, per SoSoValue.

Sage D. Young

Inflows into spot ethereum ETFs are flipping bitcoin’s. 

On Wednesday, about $309.5 million entered into US spot ethereum ETFs, extending a five-day streak of positive inflows, data from SoSoValue shows. Notably, so far in August, ethereum ETFs have notched $4 billion in inflows, while US spot bitcoin ETFs have seen $803 million of outflows, the second-highest on record and a sign of investor rotation away from bitcoin.

Matt Hougan, the chief investment officer of crypto asset manager Bitwise, said in an X post, “There is a relentless bid for ETH atm.”

Top holders of ethereum ETFs include Goldman Sachs Group, Jane Street, Millennium Management, Capula Management, and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, which have a collective exposure of more than $1.3 billion, per Bloomberg, using data from 13F filings with the SEC as of the second quarter.

By category, “advisors are dominating the known holders and have pulled away from Hedge Funds,” Bloomberg ETF research analyst James Seyffart posted on Wednesday.  

Despite having more inflows recently, spot ethereum ETFs’ cumulative inflows stand at $13.6 billion, 25% of bitcoins total inflows since inception, which sit at almost $54.2 billion. 

The price of ethereum recorded an all-time high of nearly $4,950 last week, and Bitcoin also notched a record price in August, touching the $124,000 level. But year to date, ethereum has jumped 34%, compared to bitcoin 20% increase.

In other ethereum news, Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management LLC added shares of BitMine Immersion Technologies, the leading corporate treasury firm of ethereum by total tokens held.

According to a Wednesday trading filing, Ark Investment bought 339,113 BitMine shares worth nearly $15.6 million across three of its ETFs: ARK Fintech Innovation ETF, ARK Innovation ETF, and ARK Next Generation Internet ETF.

BitMine currently has more than 1.7 million ethereum tokens, or about $7.7 billion, in its war chest.

More Crypto

See all Crypto
crypto

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.

crypto

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.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC and Chartr Limited produce fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and are fully owned subsidiaries of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, Robinhood Money, LLC, Robinhood U.K. Ltd, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, Robinhood Gold, LLC, Robinhood Asset Management, LLC, Robinhood Credit, Inc., Robinhood Ventures DE, LLC and, where applicable, its managed investment vehicles.