Ethereum-based ETFs are enjoying huge popularity in cryptocurrency markets today, with hundreds of millions of funds flowing in just a few hours after launch.
By the end of the U.S. trading day, trading volume in the new funds had reached $1 billion, according to Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan.
Although, as Blockworks’ Ben Strack noted in the On the Margin newsletter earlier Tuesday, volumes do not yet reflect net flows of funds.
Cryptocurrency markets appear to be digesting the news, with the total market cap down 2.2% in the past day to $2.5 trillion.
Read more: 9 US Ethereum Spot ETFs Launch After Landmark Approval
According to Coinbase, BTC has fallen 3.7% in the last day at press time. On the other hand, ETH has fallen slightly over the same time period.
This may be due to the negative perception of yesterday’s BTC asset movements from the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange, as markets anxiously eye a potential sell-off. According to Arkham Intelligence, the exchange moved 1,980 BTC ($132 million) to Bitstamp. Kraken also received 48,641 BTC from the Mt. Gox recovery trustee, which will be distributed within one to two weeks.
Meanwhile, the total stablecoin market capitalization is also emerging from a three-month stagnation to $156 billion, suggesting that more users are moving to blockchain, according to Artemis data. The growth of stablecoins is largely seen by investors as a key metric in assessing the health of DeFi activity, which has lagged in recent months despite the overall market’s year-to-date returns.
What about the altcoin markets? The market cap of “TOTAL3,” a proxy index for tracking the altcoin market excluding BTC and ETH, is down slightly by 2% over the past day to $626 billion, according to TradingView.
In conjunction with the momentous launch of the ETH ETF, there has also been movement around the “ETH Beta” tokens, so named due to the supposed correlation in price movements with the price of ETH itself.
Of the top 300 tokens by market cap, the biggest movers in “ETH Beta” belong to decentralized naming protocol Ethereum Name Service (ENS), with a 12% jump in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. In the crowded Layer 2 landscape, Arbitrum (ARB) is up 3%, and Metis (METIS) is up 1.5%.
However, the ETH Beta theory is being refuted by DOGE. The largest meme coin Ethereum has fallen by 7% in the last 24 hours, which correlates with the overall 7.5% drop in meme category tokens over the last day.
