Ethereum ETFs are born
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 23rd July 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
Don’t invest in crypto unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
What’s up
On Monumental Morning, ETH Slogs To $3,500
As expected, the SEC approved registration forms for spot Ethereum ETFs now set to begin trading in the U.S. today.
A slew of issuers received green lights to come to market with funds connected with the second-largest digital asset. They include 21Shares, Bitwise, BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, Invesco Galaxy and VanEck. In effect, Ethereum ETFs were born late Monday afternoon.
Back in May, and at the time rather unexpectedly, the SEC approved the listing of ETH funds on exchanges while statements of registration (describing how these funds are constructed) continued to be amended.
“I think these ETF products significantly validate the legitimacy of crypto as an asset class,” a Kraken exec, Thomas Perfumo, told The Block. “The same people who called crypto ‘rat poison’ five years ago are now the people who are creating products around it."
What's down
Mt. Gox Reprises Role As Bitcoin's Kryptonite
Bitcoin dashed to $68,200 yesterday but then came more reports of Mt. Gox-related movements of coins to a large exchange, a scenario suggesting downside pressure on the near-term horizon.
To recap, Tokyo-based Mt. Gox was once the biggest venue for trading BTC. Like, ten years ago. But then it got hacked. And collapsed. And the saga was put aside as a Japanese bankruptcy court proceeding dragged on and the first-ever cryptocurrency climbed ever-higher through the years; although for the past several months, markets readied for sell-event shoes to drop. Sure enough, earlier this month, defunct Mt. Gox began repaying creditors.
More than $9 billion worth of BTC will be distributed in the coming months (CoinDesk).
And so BTC bid farewell to the $67K handle during the wee hours of Tuesday. As of 7:23 a.m. (EST), the largest crypto was $66.6K, according to CoinGecko.
What's next
Despite Indifference, ETH Bump Possibly Looms
As news broke Monday afternoon that Ethereum ETFs were cleared for takeoff, the response was muted, as if investors who didn't care enough to buy the rumor couldn't be bothered to sell the news.
Spot ETH shed some ground, but the loss was negligible. At about 5:25 p.m. (EST), ETH stood at $3,470; about an hour later, it was $3,430. Earlier today, ETH did go slightly above $3,500 where it remained, up 1% in 24 hours as of 7 a.m. (EST).
Demand for these funds isn't likely to be on the same level as spot BTC ETFs, with most analysts estimating year-one flows in the $5B-$6B range, a firm called Wintermute noted in a new report.
Wintermute's own view: these ETFs will likely see lower-than-anticipated demand, closer to $3B-$4B, based on an expectation that ETH ETFs experience at least 15% of the flows that Bitcoin ETFs saw.
As far as the spot price of the second-largest crypto, Wintermute forecasts an increase of up to 24% by July of 2025.
