This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter, putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
Bitcoin hovered around the $70,000 mark during the European morning, a slight drop following Tuesday’s rally to as high as $71,400. BTC is currently priced at $70,069, around 1.6% lower over 24 hours. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), offering a measurement of the broader digital asset market, fell about 0.5%. BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF (IBIT) recorded over $290 million in inflows on Tuesday, its highest one-day figure since April 5 and nearly three times the previous high this month: $93 million on May 16. As a whole, ETFs took on nearly $300 million in net inflows on Tuesday.
Ether’s market cap rose by over $70 billion on Tuesday, not far off the entire market value of Solana’s sol token at around $80 billion. The ether price surged more than 19% on Monday for a total of $439 billion, according to data source TradingView. The surge followed renewed hopes that a spot ether ETF will be approved in the U.S. Analysts say the gap between ether and rivals like SOL will widen in the coming months as a potential spot ETF launch opens the token to mainstream institutional adoption. At the time of writing, ETH is priced at $3,726, a decrease of just over 0.8% in the last 24 hours.
WisdomTree has been given the green light to list bitcoin and ether ETPs on the London Stock Exchange. The asset manager said it was among the first applicants to have its prospectus given the go-ahead by the FCA. The Physical Bitcoin (BTCW) and Physical Ethereum (ETHW) ETPs are expected to start trading on May 28 and will be available only to professional investors. They will carry fees of 35 basis points. The FCA said in March it would not object to requests from financial institutions seeking to list ETPs for professional investors, a partial lift on the ban it put in place in 2020. The products however remain out of bounds for retail investors.
The chart shows the share of BTC/USDT trading that occurred during the U.S. hours (13:00 to 20:00 UTC) in the first four months of the year, starting from 2015.
The U.S. share has steadily increased, reaching a record high of 46% in 2024 as the debut of spot ETFs in the U.S. opened the doors to mainstream institutional adoption.
“The new ETFs calculate their net asset value (NAV) against dedicated benchmarks at the US close each weekday, thereby boosting arbitrage and price discovery,” Paris-based Kaiko said in the weekly newsletter, explaining the concentration of activity during the American hours.
Source: Kaiko
– Omkar Godbole
