Ether’s spot trading market share continues to rise following ETF approval

Ethereum ETH -0.93% getting SEC approval for a spot ether ETF has given the asset itself a bit of relief.

Attention on ether faded after hope for an ETF initially dwindled earlier in the year and after the Dencun upgrade went live. The asset was lagging behind both bitcoin, flourishing after its spot ETF launch, and many other crypto assets with strong rallies in the first few months of the year.

For instance,  BTC/ETH , a chart widely looked at to measure the performance between the two assets, that prices bitcoin in terms of ether, climbed from 16.6 ETH in mid-January to 22.2 ETH on May 17, indicating that one bitcoin was worth 5 more ether a few weeks ago compared to at the start of the year. However, the ratio dropped back below 18 ether shortly after the value of ether spiked in the expectation for ETF approval, bringing the pricing between the two back in line with levels seen earlier in the year.

We’ve similarly seen some pretty sharp wicks in the  SOL/ETH chart, with 1 SOL able to buy about four times as much ether as it was a year ago, even with Ethereum’s recent climb.

As part of this general ether slowdown, spot trading of the asset fell behind its main cryptocurrency peer. In March, during the peak of the recent crypto rally, the 7-day moving average of bitcoin spot volume reached as high as $29 billion, the highest level since May 2021. For ETH, though, volumes peaked at $12.75 billion, not managing to exceed a peak reached in May 2022 during the spike in trading in the sell-off caused by the collapse of Terra. 

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But on May 26, the gap between the two had narrowed, with bitcoin’s moving average dropping to $12.89 billion in trading volume compared to ether’s $11.26 billion.

In notional terms, the $1.6 billion disparity is the closest the two have been since January 2020, before the first major bull market, when volumes for both assets were relatively low, so the $1.6 billion was a larger disparity between the two.

However, ether's 87% of bitcoin’s daily volume is its largest relative share ever. The previous peak was 85% in June 2021, when trading of both assets was amplified at the height of the bull market.

It’s not surprising that we’d see ether volume spike relative to bitcoin, given that this is ether-centric news that helped push the asset’s value upwards. But the fact that this catalyst has pushed ether’s spot trading market share to levels only seen back in 2021 is significant.

This is an excerpt from  The Block's Data Insights newsletter . Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.