Ethereum Outpaces Bitcoin as ETF Inflows Top $1.2 Billion Amid Market Lull

In brief

Ethereum has gained 17% over the past month while Bitcoin slipped 5.5%.
ETH ETFs have attracted $1.2 billion in inflows after mid-August outflows.
Solana advanced 7% over the same period with a sharp rise in DEX trading volumes, though remains under pressure from a sliding DEX trader count.

Ethereum’s ability to draw institutional attention and capital is helping anchor market sentiment, even as the broader crypto market drifts in late-summer trading.

The second-largest crypto is up more than 17% over the past 30 days compared to Bitcoin’s negative return of 5.5%, CoinGecko data shows.

It follows a record setting run earlier this week, where Ethereum climbed to $4,945, its highest ever price, on Sunday.

“Ethereum offers a dynamic growth story,” Xu Han, director of Liquid Fund at HashKey Capital, told Decrypt. He pointed to deflationary tokenomics post-Merge, scalability via Layer-2 adoption, and a yield-bearing staking model.

On the last point, the amount of Ethereum that has been deployed for staking activity has continued to rise this year, reaching a record 35,750 ETH, or roughly $169 million, on August 2, according to data analytics platform Beaconchain.

While that figure has effectively plateaued in recent weeks, structural advantages, combined with its role as the foundational layer for DeFi and tokenization, continue to attract institutional inflows into Ethereum exchange-traded funds, Han said.

As of August, no U.S. Ethereum staking ETFs have been approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, though some, including digital asset manager BlackRock, are hopeful that could soon change.

Still, the attention remains fixed on the spot-based products, where Ethereum ETFs have staged a comeback after weathering outflows totaling $237.7 million from August 15 through to August 20.

As of this week, Ethereum ETFs have garnered over $1.2 billion in inflows through Thursday, according to data from SoSoValue.

Elsewhere in the market, Solana has begun to outpace its peers with a 7% gain noted since mid-August, coinciding with a 31% surge in Solana’s DEX volume to $5.10 billion over the past week, per DeFiLlama.

Though it faces its own troubles with retail traders on Solana-based decentralized exchanges having pivoted away from speculative meme coin trading, leading to a crunch in the daily DEX trader count.