Ether Pulls a Solo as ETF Money Remembers ETH Exists 🏃‍♂️

Ether is the only large-cap crypto asset moving meaningfully this week, while the rest of the major token market sits flat or lower despite a softer U.S. inflation print on Tuesday. The divergence comes as U.S. spot ether exchange-traded funds reaccelerated and a new layer-2 network began routing on-chain activity through the Ethereum network.

$ETH traded near $1,920 on Thursday, up 2.2% on the day and roughly 11% over seven sessions, giving the asset a market value of about $231 billion on roughly $12 billion of daily volume. $BTC sat at $64,600, down 0.3% on the day and up 4.2% on the week. Below the two leaders the tape turned negative: solana fell 1.1% to $77, TRON slipped to $0.32 with a 1.6% weekly decline, and Hyperliquid's HYPE lost 1.8% to $66, down 1.7% over seven days. $XRP, $BNB and dogecoin each added a little over 2% for the week, roughly a fifth of ether's move.

U.S. spot ether ETFs took in $96 million over the first three days of this week, according to SoSoValue, already more than the $84 million they gathered across all of last week. The funds had bled through late June, shedding $82 million on June 25 alone. Of the $53.8 million that came in on Wednesday, BlackRock's ETHA absorbed $45.3 million and its smaller ETHB fund took $4 million, leaving the other eight products to split less than $5 million between them. Grayscale's original ether trust, which charges 2.5% against BlackRock's 0.25%, has now bled $5.3 billion since launch.

Bitcoin's funds remain volatile by comparison. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs shed $424 million on July 13, then took back $181 million the next day, a swing that suggests short-term repositioning rather than steady allocator demand. The ether bid is correspondingly narrower, concentrated in BlackRock's low-fee products while higher-fee vehicles continue to lose assets.

Ether has also picked up a demand source that did not exist three weeks ago. Robinhood Chain, the layer-2 network the brokerage switched on July 1, uses ether for gas and has been processing more than $800 million a day in mostly memecoin trading, adding another tailwind on top of the ETF inflows that have helped lift $ETH above the rest of the large-cap market this week.