Spot Ether ETFs Debut with $1B in Volume, but Bitcoin Is Still King

It took a high-profile lawsuit and several years for spot bitcoin ETFs to finally be approved. It was well worth the wait.

Spot ether ETFs started trading on July 23 and brought in over $1 billion in trading volume.

Nine spot ether ETFs from eight different issuers were approved. They are the iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA), the Fidelity Ethereum Fund (FETH), the 21Shares Core Ethereum ETF (CETH), the Bitwise Ethereum ETF (ETHW), the VanEck Ethereum ETF (ETHV), the Franklin Ethereum ETF (EZET), the Invesco Galaxy Ethereum ETF (QETH), the conversion of the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE), and its spinoff the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust (ETH).

Most of these products have fee waivers for either the first six to 12 months or a certain amount of assets (anywhere from $500 million to $10 billion). The post-waiver fee of spot ether ETFs matches the fee of each issuer’s spot bitcoin ETF. Excluding Grayscale, these fees range from 0.19% to 0.25%. ETHE has a fee of 2.5% while its spinoff, ETH has the lowest fee of the group, at 0.15%.

These fees are relatively low. That’s especially so when considering that many spot crypto ETFs in other regions have fees in the 1%-2.5% range. It seems issuers are sacrificing margins to stay competitive and potentially become a trusted name in the crypto ETF world.

After the first trading day, these nine ETFs had over $1 billion in trading volume. (As of the time this note was written, there is not any flow data available … but there likely will be by the time you read this). But if we assume most of the volume in ETHE (Grayscale’s original Ethereum trust) is outflows and the rest of the ETFs have mostly inflows, there would be between $100M to $200M net inflows.

To compare, spot bitcoin ETFs traded over $4.5 billion in volume on their first day in January. So first day-spot ether ETF volume is between one-fourth to one-fifth of spot bitcoin volume. This isn’t unexpected.

Bitcoin is much more popular than ether, with 54% market dominance versus 17% (according to CoinMarketCap). For many investors, bitcoin has become almost synonymous with crypto and can easily be thought of as digital gold. Ether has arguably more use cases than bitcoin for blockchain technology and digital innovation (see previous research note here). But the story can be harder to sell and requires more education.