Ether Outpaces Bitcoin This Week as ETF Inflows, Robinhood Chain Boost Demand

Ether was the only major cryptocurrency to post clear gains this week, handily outperforming Bitcoin and other large-cap altcoins.

CoinDesk reported that Ether traded near $1,920 on July 16, up 2.2% on the day and about 11% over the past seven trading sessions. Its market capitalization was about $231 billion, with daily trading volume near $12 billion. Bitcoin, by contrast, traded at $64,600, down 0.3% on the day and up 4.2% for the week.

Major altcoins were mostly weaker. Solana fell 1.1% to $77, while Hyperliquid slipped 1.8% to $66. XRP, BNB and Dogecoin each rose a little more than 2% on the week, or roughly one-fifth of Ether's gain.

A key driver of Ether's strength was inflows into spot exchange-traded funds. Data platform SoSoValue showed US spot Ether ETFs pulled in $96 million over the first three trading days of this week. That already exceeded the $84 million recorded for all of last week. The rebound contrasted with June 25, when the funds posted $82 million of outflows in a single day.

The inflows were heavily concentrated in a few products. Of the $53.8 million added on Wednesday, BlackRock's ETHA took in $45.3 million, while the smaller ETHB fund drew $4 million. The other eight products split less than $5 million. Grayscale's legacy Ethereum trust, which charges a 2.5% fee, has recorded cumulative outflows of $5.3 billion since launch.

Ether has also gained a new source of demand that did not exist three weeks ago. Robinhood's Layer 2 network, Robinhood Chain, began operating on July 1 and runs on Ethereum. It is handling more than $800 million in daily decentralized exchange volume.

Spot Bitcoin ETF flows remain choppy. After $424 million exited the funds on July 13, $181 million returned the following day. CoinDesk said money leaving and reentering within 48 hours is difficult to interpret as a sign of institutional position-building. Data from on-chain analytics platform Nansen showed net Bitcoin outflows from exchanges have continued despite rising tensions in the Middle East, while migration into stablecoins has not become pronounced. Bitcoin dominance stood at 58.3%.