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Happy first birthday, ethereum ETFs

As the funds celebrate their first anniversary, they have finally started to pick up momentum.

7/22/25 12:59PM

July 23 marks one year since the SEC approved ethereum ETFs, and these funds now hold $15.7 billion in assets under management. While they had a sluggish start, the pace has picked up recently, buoyed by several factors including the GENIUS Act’s passage.

Nic Roberts-Huntley, CEO and cofounder of Blueprint Finance, told Sherwood News that ethereum ETFs have had a more measured first year compared to bitcoin’s explosive launch in January 2024, reflecting the complexity of ethereum’s value proposition rather than fundamental weakness.

In their first week of trading, ethereum ETFs suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in outflows. In contrast, bitcoin ETFs saw more than $1 billion in inflows in their first few days of trading, Farside Investors data shows.

“The institutional adoption pattern we’re seeing is actually logical — firms are starting with bitcoin as their digital asset entry point, then expanding into ethereum as they understand the infrastructure layer,” Roberts-Huntley said.

The week before their first birthday, ethereum ETFs saw record inflows, attracting $726.6 million on July 16, $600 million on July 17, and a record $2.12 billion in inflows for the full week, nearly double its previous record of $1.2 billion.

Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, told Sherwood that ethereum will benefit greatly from the regulatory clarity surrounding stablecoins and the growth in tokenization.

The stablecoin market cap stands at $262 billion, and stablecoins on the ethereum blockchain take the lion’s share with a $130 billion market cap, per DefiLlama data.

“We are seeing very strong institutional investor appetite as they better understand ethereum’s opportunity, and demand could result in $10 billion net inflows during the second half of 2025,” Leon said.

Ethereum, the second-largest crypto at a $450 billion market cap, has been on a roll lately, up 22% in the past week.

David LaValle, global head of ETFs at Grayscale, told Sherwood News that as ethereum ETFs celebrate their first anniversary, there is an increase in several key performance metrics, including client engagement, trading volumes, and fund flows, which suggests the investors are looking beyond bitcoin as they consider an allocation to crypto.

“Looking ahead, we anticipate continued ethereum ETP adoption, particularly as the market matures and ethereum’s use cases like tokenization and DeFi gain more traction,” LaValle said.

The most successful ethereum ETF is iShares Ethereum Trust ETF, with $9.6 billion in assets under management.

Following BlackRock, the other funds rounding out the top five are:

Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF, with $3.4 billion in assets under management.
Fidelity Ethereum Fund, with $1.3 billion in assets under management.
Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust ETF, with $1.3 billion in assets under management.
Bitwise Ethereum ETF, with $496 million in assets under management.

Looking ahead

Another factor that could boost ethereum ETFs even higher is whether the SEC allows staking within the funds, a change many firms and crypto insiders have supported for some time. Staking involves locking up coins and earning rewards in return for helping to secure the blockchain.

Currently, staking within US spot ethereum ETFs isn’t allowed, meaning investors may lose out on revenue opportunities if they choose to park their cash in ethereum ETFs, but this could change soon.

Recently, Nasdaq — on BlackRock’s behalf — filed an amended application with the SEC to add staking to the iShares Ethereum Trust.

Jason Linehan, VP of strategy at SharpLink Gaming, which recently became the world’s largest corporate ethereum holder and now has 360,800 tokens, told Sherwood that ethereum ETFs still have work to do to realize the full potential of ethereum as an investment.

“We hope that regulators will soon be able to approve staked ETH ETFs so that more investors can benefit from the native staking yield that ethereum offers. This will also put the billions in ETH ETFs capital to work, making the ethereum platform even safer and more secure, increasing its economic bandwidth, making it more attractive for stablecoin and tokenized RWA issuers,” Linehan said.

Blueprint Finance’s Roberts-Huntley echoed the sentiment, saying that staking-enabled ETFs will be the real unlock and that the current products are just the foundation.

“Once institutions can access both price appreciation and network rewards through a regulated wrapper, that changes the entire institutional conversation around productive digital assets,” Roberts-Huntley said.

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Coinbase sinks after missing on Q1 earnings, revenue

Shares of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, slid in after-hours trading after it missed analysts’ expectations for Q1 earnings.

The company reported:

Total revenue of $1.4 billion, below the nearly $1.5 billion analysts polled by FactSet were expecting.
Transaction revenue of $755.8 million, well below the consensus estimate of $808.1 million and a 40% decline from nearly $1.3 billion in last year’s period.
A surprise loss of $394 million, a $1.47 loss per share for the quarter, compared to net income of $65.6 million in last year’s period.

The firm has 12 products generating over $100 million on an annualized basis, with prediction markets being one of its “fastest growing products ever, on track on become the 13th product,” according to Coinbase’s presentation.

The earnings report comes in the same week CEO Brian Armstrong announced the firm is cutting 14% of its workforce, or about 700 employees, citing artificial intelligence and the need to adjust its cost structure amid a down market.

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Crypto blossoming with green shoots as ethereum and altcoins surge

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.

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Hut 8 misses on earnings, but shares fly on $9.8 billion lease for Texas AI data center campus

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.

Happy first birthday, ethereum ETFs

Looking ahead

More Crypto

Coinbase sinks after missing on Q1 earnings, revenue

Crypto blossoming with green shoots as ethereum and altcoins surge

Hut 8 misses on earnings, but shares fly on $9.8 billion lease for Texas AI data center campus

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