A good sign for Ethereum

Fund management enormity BlackRock has updated its Form S-1, a key SEC filing that needs to be approved before the firm can launch its proposed iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) exchange-traded fund (ETF).

"Good sign," said Bloomberg's widely followed ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas, in a post on X yesterday.

More money managers should follow and approval of a slew of spot ETH ETFs by the end of June is starting to look like a legitimate possibility (Cointelegraph).

Last week, the SEC approved Form 19b-4 filings from several issuers, a sign of “notable progress for these products to list on U.S. exchanges,” Grayscale said.

Investors, however, didn’t whip together an elixir using the latest tea leaves; ETH strained to move in the wake of the key development.

Clearly not slacking off today is Notcoin. Telegram's play-to-earn game has transfixed the messaging platform, producing a digital asset, NOT, that now boasts a market capitalization of $1.25 billion. CoinGecko, as of 7:49 a.m. (EST), has NOT in 81st place. NOT's all-time high of $0.01244 came earlier this morning. NOT is +133% over the past week, per CoinGecko.

Whether we're talking major digital assets with international staying power or even the latest flash-in-the-pan memecoins, the state of the crypto space seems, oh, how can we say it – quietly resigned to grinding consolidation?

Among Top 30 assets, Pepe (PEPE) has endured the biggest decline on the day. The frog-based memecoin, after reaching a new ATH three days ago, has seen its price decrease by 9% in the past 24 hours. Floki (FLOKI) and Dogwifhat (WIF) and Bonk (BONK) are all tumbling, too.

Additionally, AI-empowered Turbo (TURBO) is also losing thrust, falling a few spots out of the Top 200. Its non-plussed toad mascot perhaps becoming tiresome, TURBO, which hit its record high on Tuesday, has plunged 40% since then. Its market cap remains close to $400M.

Bitcoin is flat. Ethereum is down 2%. So too is XRP.

"Altcoins are waiting for their breakout to come," popular analyst Michaël van de Poppe said yesterday in a post on X. "The trigger is going to be the listing of Ethereum ETFs."

After issuing its own stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain last August, PayPal announced yesterday it's taking that dollar-pegged token, PayPal USD (PYUSD), to Solana. When transferring out of PayPal and Venmo accounts (to external wallets), users now have the choice to send PYUSD on Ethereum or Solana.

Despite its history of outages, Solana was selected by PayPal because it's faster and cheaper, Bloomberg pointed out.

DLNews put it this way: "In its long-running rivalry with Ethereum, Solana has enlisted a surprising new ally."

Sheraz Shere, head of payments at the Solana Foundation, added: "Continued adoption from industry participants like PayPal helps realize the next generation of fintech innovation."

PayPal/Venmo wallets show PYUSD as a "unified balance regardless of the blockchain," the online payments pioneer said in a press release.

Solana right now is in the midst of a memecoin explosion that some critics have decried as a bad look. More than a few crypto veterans have warned against investing in memecoins due to their lack of utility and the "casino-like atmosphere" permeating meme markets, Cointelegraph said.

A Bitrue analyst added that the market frenzy can “distort the image of cryptocurrencies, potentially undermining their credibility."

PayPal hitching PYUSD to Solana's wagon should serve to elevate the network’s cachet in the competitive world of payments processing, a space that is expected, by some estimates, to balloon to $5 trillion by the end of the decade.