Happy first birthday, bitcoin spot ETFs

Crypto markets are warming into a spring rebound as green shoots emerge in the sector.

Ethereum broke above $2,400 Wednesday morning, its highest mark since the end of January, with open interest across Binance, Bybit, OKX, Deribit, and Hyperliquid jumping to almost $12 billion from $10.7 billion on Wednesday morning, a sign new traders are opening positions, data from blockchain analytics firm Velo.xyz shows. 

Coinciding with the price action, institutional flows are positive, with ETFs seeing three straight days of inflows, totaling $260 million in the period, according to SoSoValue. 

“Crypto Spring, in our view, has commenced and like past cycles, investor sentiment and conviction are muted and bearish even as crypto prices strengthen,” BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said Monday, while announcing the firm added 101,745 ethereum tokens to its stockpile last week. 

Meanwhile, privacy and meme tokens are rallying, too:

• Dogecoin, adored by billionaire Elon Musk, has climbed as high as 11.7 cents, a level not seen since January. 

• DASH has increased 22.8% in the last 24 hours.

• Zcash, a privacy coin, rallied to a five-month high, breaking past $600 before settling at $574 as of 10:45 a.m. ET, a 33.3% surge in the same period.

Zcash’s upswing comes after Tushar Jain, cofounder and managing partner at investment firm Multicoin Capital, announced that it “built a significant position in $ZEC since February.” 

“We believe that truly private, censorship and seizure resistant assets have clear product-market fit and demand is accelerating… $ZEC is the cleanest way to express this thesis in public markets,” Jain said on X.

Shares of Hut 8 are up more than 34% in early trading on Wednesday on news the firm signed a $9.8 billion deal to lease its AI facility in Texas over a 15-year period to provide compute capacity for a “high-investment-grade” company.

While the tenant of Hut 8’s Texas data center campus remains confidential, the firm’s CEO, Asher Genoot, said in an earnings call that the tenant is not Anthropic nor Google.

The announcement comes on the same day the firm released its first-quarter earnings, which missed analysts’ expectations.

• The AI compute company and bitcoin miner reported Q1 revenue of $71 million, compared to the FactSet analyst consensus estimate of $78.4 million.

• Hut 8 also reported a Q1 net loss of $134.3 million versus a loss of $250.7 million for the prior year period.

“We continue to execute against our 2025 roadmap by advancing potential catalysts for topline growth, including the energization of Vega, the initial sitework at River Bend, and the development of our utility-scale power portfolio,” Genoot said.

“We believe these initiatives will further accelerate our ability to generate resilient near-term cash flows while building toward enduring leadership across next-generation digital infrastructure markets,” Genoot continued.

On Monday, Hut 8 entered into a $200 million bitcoin-backed credit facility with crypto prime broker FalconX, a move that not only replaces its prior arrangement with Coinbase but also reduces debt costs.

Bloomberg also reported last week that the company sold $3.25 billion of investment-grade bonds to finance the development of a turnkey data center tied to Google.

Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, with 818,334 bitcoin, reported its first-quarter earnings, missing analysts’ earnings-per-share estimates but beating on revenue. Shares dipped in aftermarket trading. 

For the first three months of 2026, Strategy reported:

• Revenue from its legacy software business of $124.3 million, above analysts’ consensus estimate of $121 million.

But the main focus is on its bitcoin operations. Strategy, with a $65 billion market cap, purchased its bitcoin at an average price of $75,537. The company reported a $14.46 billion unrealized loss on its digital assets in its first quarter, according to an April 8-K filing, following bitcoin’s descent over the past three months.

This compares to an unrealized loss on digital assets of $5.91 billion for the first quarter of 2025.

It also reported a bitcoin yield of 9.4% in 2026 year to date, and a bitcoin gain of $4.97 billion in 2026 YTD.

Ahead of earnings, the company skipped buying bitcoin this week, the second weekly break this year.  

Proceeds from STRC, Strategy’s perpetual preferred equity instrument, launched in July 2025, have enabled the firm to maintain its acquisition pace despite bitcoin’s tumble this quarter. This includes a massive purchase of 34,164 bitcoin for $2.54 billion in April, its largest acquisition since November 2024. STRC raised $5.58 billion, a 189% growth in 2026 YTD.

In April, TD Cowen analysts reiterated their “buy” rating on Strategy, as their “top digital asset pick,” with a $385 price target, saying the continued innovation at the instrument level “remains a key differentiator supporting long‑term shareholder value creation.”