Bitcoin
Bitcoin (BTC) Recovers $66K After Upbeat ETF Data
Bitcoin (BTC) rose to surpassed $66,000 on Friday, reversing Thursday’s pullback under $65,000. At the time of writing, its price was around $66,440, up 0.4% from 24 hours ago, while the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), which offers a measure of the broader digital asset market, rose around 1.4%. Inflows into spot bitcoin ETFs turned positive again this week, recording additions for four consecutive days. This week we also saw several large institutional players disclose sizable BTC ETF holdings. Morgan Stanley, for example, yesterday revealed an investment of US$269.9 million in Grayscale’s GBTC.
Ether may have underperformed other major digital assets this year, but Coinbase says it had the potential to surprise positively. Ether has no significant sources of supply-side swings, the exchange said in a research report this week. “On the contrary, both staking and layer 2 growth have proven to be significant and growing sinks of ETH liquidity,” wrote analyst David Han. “ETH’s position as the center of DeFi is also unlikely to be displaced, in our opinion, due to the widespread adoption of EVM and its layer 2 innovations.” Coinbase also noted that the potential for approval of US spot ETH ETFs cannot be overstated.
The FTM of the Fantom blockchain is one of the best performing non-meme tokens of the past week as the market looks favorably on the implementation of the Sonic upgrade and increases the total value locked in the protocol. FTM has gained 13% over the past seven days to about 81 cents, according to data from CoinDesk Indices, while CD20 is just 1.5% higher. Over the past few weeks, the Fantom Foundation has been promoting Sonic, its latest update, which is expected to increase transaction speeds to 2,000 transactions per second with 1.1 second completion. That compares to just over 2.5 TPS during the past month, network data shows.