Markets
Bitcoin (BTC) Regains $66,000 Following Bullish ETF Data
Bitcoin (BTC) rose to surpassed $66,000 early Friday, reversing Thursday’s decline below $65,000. At the time of writing, its price was around $66,440, 0.4% higher than 24 hours ago, while the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), which offers a measure of broader digital asset market, was up about 1.4%. Inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs turned positive again this week, recording additions for four consecutive days. This week, many high-profile institutional players also disclosed significant BTC ETF holdings. Morgan Stanley, for example, yesterday revealed a $269.9 million investment in Grayscale’s GBTC.
Ether may have underperformed other major digital assets this year, but Coinbase says it had potential to surprise on the upside. Ether has no significant sources of supply-side overhangs, the exchange said in a research report this week. “On the contrary, 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 view 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 favorably views the rollout of its Sonic upgrade and the increase in total value locked on the protocol. FTM has gained 13% over the past seven days to around 81 cents, according to data from CoinDesk Indices, while CD20 is only up 1.5%. Over the past few weeks, the Fantom Foundation released Sonic, its latest upgrade, which is expected to increase transaction speeds to 2,000 transactions per second with a finality of 1.1 seconds. This compares to just over 2.5 TPS over the past month, according to on-chain data.