Ether’s Bullish Momentum Continues with Institutional Demand

Just like Bitcoin surged to a record high, nearly $52,700 on Wednesday, Ether has broken past the $1,900 level, hitting nearly $1,930.

For Bitcoin, “what stands out most is the trend that MicroStrategy started, and Tesla popularized: moving institutional balance sheets into Bitcoin to hedge against inflation,” said Nicholas Pelecanos, head of trading at NEM.

The Bitcoin futures market sees a lot of activity, with volume keeping above $50 billion this month and at times hitting $100 million.

CME Group is particularly getting traction, hitting a record $5 billion mark for the first time on Tuesday.

CME #bitcoin futures most active day on record yesterday with $5bln+ trading pic.twitter.com/fdkIZDEbNL

— skew (@skewdotcom) February 17, 2021

Interestingly, hedge funds continue to be record short on Bitcoin on CME, but at the same time, they are record long on Grayscale, capturing the premium on GBTC. They are also earning over 50% annualized funding from the basis trade on their USD.

As of writing, the price of Bitcoin on Coinbase was $51,525 and $52,090 on CME.

Earlier this month, CME also launched Ether futures, which started slowly, much like Bitcoin futures when they were listed in Dec. 2017.

But “it will likely not take as long for Ethereum futures to begin gaining traction as it initially took for Bitcoin futures, as investor interest in cryptocurrencies has had a few years to mature,” noted JPMorgan strategists.

Already daily trading volume of Ethereum futures on CME has doubled, and open interest surpassed $60 million.

The growing institutional demand for Ether can also be seen on Grayscale, the largest digital asset manager, which bought over 20k ETH in the last 24 hours, bringing its total holdings to 3.15 million ETH.

As we reported, the fundamentals of the second largest cryptocurrency are very strong. The fees are crazy high and never seen before levels of addresses continue to interact with Ethereum.

The network is also seeing an average of 1.2 million daily transactions and an average of 550k daily active addresses. Large transactions, more than $100k, that act as a proxy to institutional activity, have also recorded an increase of 45x in the past year.

All 7 of our Actionable Signals are showing a Bullish momentum for #Ethereum

Why?
+ change in net network growth vs previous week
+ 7-day MA of addresses profitability
Whales and investors are adding to their ETH positions
+ shift in number of $100k txs
+ futures market momentum pic.twitter.com/zpBZEd3644

— IntoTheBlock (@intotheblock) February 18, 2021

Even on social media, conversations around ETH have nearly doubled since the beginning of the year, with over 20.6k tweets (on average) sent out about ETH every day, up from 10.9k on January 1st, as per data provider The TIE.

In that regard, the price of Ether is slow-moving, though it outperforms Bitcoin with 160% YTD gains compared to leading cryptocurrency’s 75%.