Ethereum Outperforms Bitcoin Despite Sluggish ETF Flows

Ethereum has been slow to keep up with this cycle’s bull trend, but it’s been slowly catching up lately. ETH is up 8% over the past fortnight, outpacing the grandfather of all blockchains, Bitcoin, which grew in value by 5% over the same time period.

This type of price action comes amid an uptick in interest from institutional traders in Ethereum ETFs. Large entities added $57 million in ETH to their coffers after two weeks of outflows, wrote CoinShares’s head of research James Butterfill.

ETH is down 1% to $2,673 today. Traders and Ethereum bulls continue to hope the asset will reach its previous all-time high of $4,850 and leave its sluggish growth behind.

Notably, despite institutions adding more than $2.1 billion in BTC to their balance sheets, it didn’t translate to better price action than the second most valuable network in the industry, Ethereum. Even so, many of the top 10 cryptocurrencies have already surpassed or neared their previous all-time highs, something ETH has failed to do.

The ETH/BTC ratio also sits under 0.04 ETH per bitcoin, a level not seen since January 2021.

Price action favoring ETH over BTC amid fewer inflows could be a symptom of a smaller market capitalization that suffers more price volatility when capital enters or exits the instrument.

Driving the $2.2 billion in inflows across crypto assets is the optimism investors have in a Donald Trump victory as the Nov. 4 election approaches.

All bets are on, with Polymarket receiving more than $2 billion in bets which wildly favor the Republican candidate over his Democrat contender, Kamala Harris. He leads with 62% odds over Harris’s 38%, though traditional polls have him behind by less than 2 percentage points.