Ether outruns Bitcoin as ETF money returns, almost all of from BlackRock's fund

Ether is the only large-cap crypto asset doing much of anything this week, and the softer U.S. inflation print that lifted the market on Tuesday does not explain it.

Ether traded near $1,920 on Thursday, up 2.2% on the day and roughly 11% over seven sessions, carrying a market value of about $231 billion on roughly $12 billion of daily volume. Bitcoin sat at $64,600, down 0.3% on the day and up 4.2% on the week. Below them the tape turns negative.

Solana fell 1.1% to $77 and is lower over seven days. TRON slipped to $0.32, down 1.6% on the week. Hyperliquid's HYPE lost 1.8% to $66 and is down 1.7%. XRP, BNB and dogecoin each added a little over 2% for the week, roughly a fifth of ether's move.

Two factors have provide tailwinds for ether this week.

US spot ether ETFs took in $96 million over the first three days of this week, according to SoSoValue, already more than the $84 million they gathered across all of last week. The funds bled through late June, shedding $82 million on June 25 alone.

Bitcoin's funds are still lurching, however. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs shed $424 million on July 13, then took back $181 million the next day. Money leaving and returning inside 48 hours is not indicative of an allocator building a position.

As such, the ether bid is narrower. Of the $53.8 million that came in on Wednesday, BlackRock's ETHA absorbed $45.3 million and its smaller ETHB fund took $4 million, leaving the other eight products to split less than $5 million between them.

Grayscale's original ether trust, which charges 2.5% against BlackRock's 0.25%, has now bled $5.3 billion since launch.

Ether also picked up a demand source that did not exist three weeks ago. Robinhood Chain, the layer-2 network the brokerage switched on July 1, pays gas in ether and settles to Ethereum, and it has been clearing more than $800 million in daily decentralized exchange volume, most of it memecoin trading.

Bitcoin is steadier than its ETF flows suggest, however. Nansen data shows exchange outflows holding through the escalation in the Middle East, with no meaningful rotation into stablecoins, the move that usually marks wallets stepping back.

Funding rates are near zero, which is suggestive of the overleveraged longs that fuelled June's liquidation cascades have already been cleared out. Bitcoin dominance is 58.3%.