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Ethereum drops below $4,000 as Rex-Osprey launches first ETF with ethereum staking

Mounting concerns over digital asset treasuries buying crypto near the top of the market may be weighing on overall sentiment.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Ethereum, the second-largest crypto by market cap, dropped below $4,000 early Thursday for the first time since August 7, down over 4% in the past 24 hours and 19% from just over a month ago, when it hit an all-time high of $4,946.

Ethereum ETFs are also suffering, with $296 million in outflows since Monday, according to SoSoValue data.

Michael McCluskey, CEO of Sologenic, told Sherwood News that ethereum’s volatility isn’t a reflection of its fundamentals; rather, it’s the byproduct of new economic forces, namely large-scale institutional players entering in ways the network has never experienced.

“Although this shift brings short-term turbulence, it also signals ethereum’s progression into mainstream finance. Mix this with a recent historic market rally, key US inflation data, and fresh signals from the Federal Reserve, and you have investors who are jittery,” he said, adding that as tokenization of real-world assets gains traction on ethereum, institutional participation should stabilize markets and reinforce ETH’s role as a core digital asset.

Kevin Rusher, founder of real-world asset protocol RAAC, said there was another factor: mounting concerns over digital asset treasuries buying crypto near the top of the market, which is weighing on overall sentiment. 

“Add to this the competition from other chains, and it makes sense that ETH has given up some of its gains,” he said. 

Despite the volatility, ethereum advocates are marching on with their plans. Rex-Osprey, fresh off the launches of its XRP and dogecoin ETFs, launched its ETH + Staking ETF, the first US ETF to give investors exposure to ethereum with staking rewards.

“Making the returns of ETH plus staking available to investors in their securities accounts is a big step forward for both ETH and the ETF industry,” Rex Shares CEO Greg King told Sherwood.

The SEC also just approved the expansion of the Hashdex Nasdaq Crypto Index US, which offers exposure to ethereum, bitcoin, XRP, solana, and stellar.

Greg Benhaim, executive vice president of product at digital asset manager 3iQ, said that while the SEC’s new generic listing standards rule seems bullish for the industry, it may be challenging for issuers to fight to raise capital when new products are being listed every single day.

“The average investor may have a tough time distinguishing between which coins to purchase,” Benhaim said. “Over the long term, this will pave the way for the industry to identify which assets have significant retail appeal in ETF format and which don’t.”

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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