Ether is beating Bitcoin by a wide margin this week, and the reason appears to have to do with a very specific type of money coming in via exchange-traded funds. Tuesday’s weaker inflation data helped the broader market, but Ether also climbed on its own.
Ether traded around $1,920 on Thursday, up about 2.2% on the day and about 11% over the past seven sessions. Its market capitalization stands at nearly $231 billion, on a daily volume of around $12 billion. In contrast, Bitcoin held steady at $64,600, down 0.3% for the day and up just 4.2% for the week. Below the first two, things get even quieter. Solana fell 1.1% to $77 and is negative for seven days. TRON slipped to $0.32, down 1.6% for the week. Hyperliquid’s HYPE lost 1.8% to $66 and is also down 1.7%. XRP, BNB, and dogecoin each added just over 2% for the week, about a fifth of Ether’s move.
ETF Flows Tell a Clear Story
US Spot Ether ETFs brought in $96 million in the first three days of this week, according to SoSoValue. This already exceeds the $84 million raised over the past week. By the end of June, these funds were bleeding – losing $82 million on June 25 alone. The change is notable.
However, Bitcoin ETF flows remain irregular. US spot Bitcoin ETFs lost $424 million on July 13, then recovered $181 million the next day. A fund that loses and recovers that much in 48 hours is not typical of a long-term allocator building a position. This seems more like short-term noise.
For this reason, the supply of Ether seems narrower and more concentrated. Of the $53.8 million invested in Ether ETFs on Wednesday, BlackRock’s ETHA took in $45.3 million. Its smaller fund ETHB took another $4 million. That leaves the other eight products sharing less than $5 million. Grayscale’s original Ether trust, which still charges 2.5% compared to BlackRock’s 0.25%, has lost $5.3 billion since its launch.
New request for Robinhood Chain
Ether also spotted a source of demand that didn’t exist three weeks ago. Robinhood Chain, the layer 2 network that the brokerage activated on July 1, pays for gas in Ether and settles in Ethereum. It cleared over $800 million in daily decentralized trading volume, most of it memecoin trading. This isn’t huge relative to the market as a whole, but it adds a new use case for Ether beyond speculation.
Bitcoin is more stable below
Despite the ETF turmoil, Bitcoin might be more stable than the surface suggests. Nansen data shows that currency outflows are holding up despite escalating tensions in the Middle East. There was no significant rotation into stablecoins, which is typically the move portfolios make when moving away from risk.
Funding rates are near zero, suggesting that the overleveraged long positions that fueled the June liquidation cascades have already been eliminated. Bitcoin dominance is 58.3% – still high, but not moving aggressively in either direction. For now, Ether is doing the heavy lifting.
