Ethereum hits three-month low as price decline outpaces crypto peers
Spot ethereum ETFs also a fifth straight day of outflows, with roughly $219 million leaving the investment funds on Tuesday.
The price of ethereum dropped to a three-month low on Tuesday, slipping as low as $3,097, though it has recovered Wednesday. Still, its drop over the past 24 hours was the worst among the top 50 tokens by market capitalization, data pulled from CoinGecko shows.
The price action comes as spot ethereum ETFs recorded five straight days of outflows, with $219.4 million leaving the investment funds Tuesday. The ongoing streak’s total outflow now stands at $719 million, per SoSoValue.
Ethereum’s decline comes as several major treasury firms have an outstanding mNAV under 1. The metric, defined as a company’s market cap divided by the value of its crypto asset holdings, matters because it shows how much a company is worth in the public market relative to the worth of its ethereum assets, per Tony Lau, an investment partner at Primitive Ventures.
BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming, the two largest ethereum treasury firms, have an mNAV of 0.93 and 0.85, respectively. The mNAVs of Fg Nexus Inc., ETHZilla, and Blockchain Technology Consensus Solutions, which have combined holdings of $727 million ethereum tokens, range 0.6 to 0.77, according to Blockworks Research.
“When mNAV>1, the company is worth more than the ethereum they are holding and hence they can do ATM (stock issuance at the market price) to buy ethereum to make the shareholder accretive on a ETH per share basis,” Lau told Sherwood News.
On the other hand, when the metric dips under 1, a firm is worth less than its ethereum holdings, losing its capacity to issue shares and buy ethereum because it doesn’t make economic sense for the company’s shareholders, Lau continued.
Ethereum was fundamentally the same when it was trading at the $2,000 level, but “now we do not have mNAV premiums anymore, treasury companies are not able to capture those premiums by doing ATM to accumulate ETH,” Lau wrote. “Moreover we are seeing treasury companies like ETHZilla selling their ETH holdings when mNAV is below 1, adding more selling pressure to Ethereum.”
Last week, ETHZilla announced it sold $40 million of its ethereum treasury to facilitate stock repurchases and has plans to continue offloading the token “until the discount to NAV is normalized,” its press release stated.
