TD Cowen initiates coverage of flailing Nakamoto with “buy” rating while cutting Strategy’s price target

Ethereum has been stuck between $2,000 and $2,150 in the past week amid ongoing scrutiny toward the Ethereum Foundation, which has seen its talent pool thin out.

“ETH continues to show weakness... ETH/BTC keeps grinding lower, at a 10-month low,” Jasper De Maere, a desk strategist and OTC trader at Wintermute, posted on X. “The marginal risk dollar went into equities, not crypto. When AI semis are working and yields are easing, crypto should follow. It didn’t.”

De Maere continued, “Based on our OTC flow, we see that institutional buying pressure, which was responsible for the recent +ve price action, is now fading quickly, indicating that institutional investors might be at capacity or are re-assessing risk/reward at these new levels.”

Data from SoSoValue shows ethereum ETFs have seen 10 consecutive days of outflows, totaling more than $471.1 million.

Meanwhile, the blockchain’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin, who sits on the board of the Ethereum Foundation, addressed the controversy surrounding the nonprofit over the weekend. Holding around 0.16% of ethereum’s total supply, the foundation is not the center of blockchain network, but rather “one node, with a defined purpose alongside other nodes,” according to Buterin, who says nearly 90% of his net worth is in ethereum.

“EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months,” Buterin said, adding that the EF will sell ethereum less and focus on remaining censorship-resistant, open-source, private, and secure.

“The most high-value ‘product’ of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH,” Buterin continued. “That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset — *necessary* aspects even — that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help.”

Carlos Guzman, vice president of research at crypto trading firm GSR, said Vitalik’s response is a bet on credible neutrality as ethereum’s durable competitive advantage, which attracts liquidity, users, and apps, because “builders and institutions gravitate toward platforms they can trust won’t be captured or co-opted. This is what builds network effects, and network effects are what create durable moats,” Guzman wrote on X.

And yet, Guzman argued credible neutrality is just one piece of the puzzle:

“The risk is that a nimbler chain builds sufficient network effects by executing well on fees, throughput, and UX today while promising credible neutrality tomorrow. Vitalik’s vision is arguably the right one. Whether the ecosystem can execute on it before that window closes remains uncertain.”

Blockchain.com, one of the oldest crypto firms, announced it confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a step toward conducting an initial public offering.

The number of offered shares and price range has yet to be determined, according to a Thursday press release. If the company completes its IPO, Blockchain.com would join Circle and Bullish as crypto companies that have gone public in the year.

Simultaneously, a number of other companies, namely ethereum development firm Consensys, security hardware firm Ledger, and rival crypto exchange Kraken, have paused their plans to IPO due to rough market conditions.

The exchange started in 2011 as a bitcoin search engine before expanding to providing wallets and powering bitcoin transactions. The company raised funds through a series of funding rounds, with a Series D funding round in 2022 giving the firm a $14 billion valuation at the time.

While investors are opting out of ETFs focused on the two largest cryptocurrencies, some are adding ETFs of alternative coins, chief among them being hype, the native token for Hyperliquid. 

Digital asset managers 21shares and Bitwise rolled out hype ETFs last week and have yet to notch any outflows. Tuesday saw the highest level of inflows so far at over $11 million, outpacing XRP and solana ETFs’ combined inflow of nearly $5.3 million. Meanwhile, bitcoin and ethereum saw $393 million exit their funds yesterday, according to SoSoValue.

Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted the 21shares Hyperliquid ETF “is growing volume each day since launch in the tens of millions now, 8x over day one, which is [a] really good sign of organic interest.”

The ETF flows coincide with the token’s outperformance, jumping 5.7% in the last 24 hours, 29.5% in the past seven days, and more than 100% year to date, data from CoinMarketCap shows. Bitcoin, ethereum, solana, and XRP are all down double digits in 2026.

Hype began trading a week after former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler announced ending his tenure, and has an all-time high price of $59.30, set in September 2025.

Hyperliquid, the perpetual futures exchange built on its own blockchain, gained traction among users who wanted to trade assets such as commodities, cryptocurrencies, and equities with leverage in hours when traditional venues are closed. 

Treasury firm Hyperliquid Strategies has also rallied on news the SEC will soon greenlight trading tokenized versions of stocks.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan thinks investors are underestimating Hyperliquid’s impact and value. “The market is valuing Hyperliquid as a perpetual crypto futures exchange that happens to be growing quickly. But it should be valued as a global super-app covering all assets,” Hougan said in a Tuesday memo.

“Its addressable universe is not the $3 trillion crypto market, but the $600 trillion market for global assets. Those are two completely different businesses,” Hougan continued. “Today’s prices suggest you’re being offered the second at the cost of the first.”

Last week, Coinbase and Circle announced a new agreement with Hyperliquid. Coinbase became Hyperliquid’s official treasury deployer of Circle’s USDC on Hyperliquid, a move that translates to sharing around 90% of stablecoin reserve yield with the protocol.

99% of fees generated on Hyperliquid are dedicated to token buybacks, which, annualized, comes to $618 million, data from DefiLlama shows. The market capitalization of hype stands at $12.3 billion.