However, Bitcoin’s funds are still floating. US spot bitcoin ETFs lost $424 million on July 13, then regained $181 million the next day. Money leaving and returning within 48 hours is not a sign that an allocator is building a position.
As such, the ether bid is narrower. Of the $53.8 million that came in Wednesday, BlackRock’s ETHA absorbed $45.3 million and its smaller ETHB fund took $4 million, leaving the other eight products to share less than $5 million between them.
Grayscale’s original ether trust, which charges 2.5% versus BlackRock’s 0.25%, has now bled $5.3 billion since launch.
Ether also picked up a source of demand that didn’t exist three weeks ago. Robinhood Chain, the layer-2 network that the brokerage switched on July 1, pays gas in ether and settles in Ethereum, and it has cleared more than $800 million in daily decentralized exchange volume, most of it trading in memecoin.
However, Bitcoin is more stable than its ETF flows suggest. Nansen data shows that exchange outflows are holding through the escalation in the Middle East, with no meaningful rotation to stablecoins, the move that usually marks wallets stepping back.
Funding rates are close to zero, suggesting that the excess longs that led to June’s liquidation cascades have already been cleared. Bitcoin dominance is 58.3%.
