Why ether ETFs lost more than bitcoin ETFs this week, and what it says about ETH

US spot ether ETFs lost about $320 million in the five sessions from 12 to 16 October, more than the roughly $228.6 million that left bitcoin ETFs, according to SoSoValue daily data, a total Crypto Briefing also reported. The ether funds are about a seventh the size of the bitcoin funds. Set against what they hold, these ethereum ETF outflows took about 2.0% of net assets in a week, against about 0.2% for bitcoin.

Both coins faced the same hot inflation print, the same bond sell-off and the same oil shock. So why did the institutional bid under ether give way so much faster? Our reading, built on the figures below, is that the ether ETF market rests on a smaller and more tactical set of holders, concentrated in one fund, and that no buyer specific to ether stepped in when they sold. The last section lists what would prove that reading wrong.

Friday’s Wall Street session and the bitcoin side of the flows are covered in our morning report on bitcoin’s weekend in Asia; this piece stays on ether.

At 19:10 UTC on Saturday 17 October, ETH traded near $2,414 and BTC near $81,440, according to Coindaro’s market data. Over seven days ether was down 3.62% and bitcoin 1.89%. Those two prices put the ETH/BTC ratio at about 0.0296 (Coindaro computation).

Ethereum ETF outflows day by day: $320M against bitcoin’s $228.6M

Spot ETF flows come from the creations and redemptions that authorised participants, the large brokers allowed to deal directly with a fund, make each day. They are published after the US close, which is why Friday’s numbers landed on Saturday. The table uses SoSoValue’s daily totals in millions of dollars. Farside Investors, the other common tracker, shows the same daily totals to within $0.1M, and its fund-by-fund lines fill in Wednesday. Issuers sometimes revise a day by a million or two.

Bitcoin funds had the worst single day, Wednesday’s -$261.46M after the CPI release. They also had two positive days, one of them large: +$175.62M on Tuesday. Ether funds managed a single inflow on the same Tuesday, +$24.84M, a seventh of bitcoin’s. On Thursday, when bitcoin ETFs were slightly in the black, ether ETFs lost another $60.22M.

Bitcoin’s week was a tug of war, with buyers on two days out of five. Ether’s was one-way traffic with a pause.

Ether ETFs traded $773.15M of shares on Thursday and $645.81M on Friday, by SoSoValue’s count. Bitcoin ETFs turned over more than $10B over the week, Bitcoin.com reported.

Coindaro’s computation: about 2.0% of ether ETF assets left in five days, against 0.2%

Dollar totals understate ether’s problem. A $320M outflow from a $16B blockchain that runs exactly as written when it is called, holding and moving funds according to its code, without an intermediary able to change the outcome.">smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">pool is not the same event as a $229M outflow from a $106B pool. The ratios in this section are Coindaro’s own arithmetic on SoSoValue data, rounded.

Ether funds held $15.86B of net assets at Monday’s close; $319.97M is 2.0% of that. Bitcoin funds held $106.06B at the same close; $228.57M is 0.2%. Ether ETF holders therefore redeemed roughly nine times as large a slice of their position as bitcoin ETF holders did in the same week.

The week before, bitcoin funds lost more than ether funds in dollars, $681M against $542M, and Crypto Briefing called the ether figure the worst week since late January. From one week to the next, bitcoin’s outflows shrank by about two thirds (The Defiant put it at 66%, as cited by Crypto Briefing). Ether’s shrank by about 40% (Coindaro computation). Over two weeks the dollar totals are almost level, about $862M for ether and $910M for bitcoin, while the bitcoin funds are seven times larger.

October puts it more bluntly. Adding up SoSoValue’s daily figures, ether ETFs took in about $1.57B in 2026 up to the end of September, then lost about $955M in October’s first twelve sessions. That leaves about +$612M for the year to date: October has given back roughly 61% of the year’s net inflow (Coindaro computation).

Net assets fell from $15.86B on Monday to $14.95B on Friday, a drop of about $910M. Flows from Tuesday to Friday explain about $235M of it. The rest is the lower price of ether.

BlackRock’s ETHA did almost all the selling

On Friday, BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) was the only ether fund with any flow: -$69.68M. Grayscale’s ETHE and its Mini fund, Fidelity’s FETH and the other seven US ether funds all recorded zero, according to SoSoValue.

Over the week, ETHA’s lines add up to about -$299M of the -$320M net, about 93% (Coindaro computation from SoSoValue and Farside fund data). ETHA held $8.09B at Friday’s close, 54% of the $14.95B in all US spot ether funds. A fund with just over half the assets made almost the entire net outflow.

The week before looked the same. ETHA accounted for about $477M of the $542M that left, roughly 88%, according to Crypto Briefing, which wrote on 17 October that the fund “has often accounted for 80% or more of total Ether ETF redemptions”.

Concentration says something about who owns the wrapper. ETHA is the most liquid ether fund, the one large allocators reach for first, and so the easiest to leave. What the data cannot show is who sold. A hedge fund closing a hedged trade, a wealth manager cutting risk and a retail account all look the same in a daily redemption number.

Even the week’s one inflow came without ETHA, which recorded zero on Tuesday while Grayscale’s Mini and FETH took in money. A positive day in which the biggest fund sits out is weak evidence of a turn.

The money leaving ether funds did not move into other US crypto ETFs either. On Friday, Bitcoin.com reported, solana ETFs lost $12.67M, all from Bitwise’s BSOL, their tenth straight day of outflows and about $25.5M for the week. Canary’s XRP fund lost $2.47M and a Zcash fund $1.22M. Bitwise’s NEAR fund took in $2.61M, the only positive line.

The ETH/BTC ratio fell below 0.03 for the first time since August

The ETH/BTC ratio is the number of bitcoins one ether buys. When it falls, ether is losing ground to bitcoin whatever the dollar price does. It moved the same way as the flows.

The ratio slipped under 0.03 on Monday evening, US time, for the first time since 19 August, with a low of 0.02970, TokenPost reported at 22:13 EDT (02:13 UTC on 13 October), describing “continued Ether underperformance against Bitcoin”. CoinGecko’s daily series, taken at 00:00 UTC, shows how far it has come: about 0.0317 on 17 September, 0.0297 on 16 October.

This is not an extreme for 2026. On the same CoinGecko series the ratio started January above 0.033, peaked near 0.036 on 20 January and touched its year low of about 0.0248 on 7 June. In between, CoinDesk reported a ten-month low of 0.02835 on 12 May. Other data providers put the June low slightly higher, so read these as approximate levels.

Over the same seven days to 19:10 UTC on Saturday, solana lost 5.47% and XRP 7.50%, according to Coindaro’s market data. Ether sat between bitcoin and the smaller coins, roughly where a riskier large asset sits in a risk-off week.

A macro week that hit growth assets harder than bitcoin

The data calendar was the same for both coins. September consumer prices, published on 14 October, rose 3.7% over a year, with core prices up 0.3% in the month and 2.6% over a year, CoinShares noted, citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On 15 October producer prices jumped 1.3% in the month, the largest rise since March 2022, according to the BLS. On Friday, WTI crude traded near $101 a barrel, the 10-year Treasury yield stood above 5.1% and the Nasdaq fell 2.1%.

The Fed raised its target range to 3.75-4.00% in September, its first hike since July 2023. On Friday CoinDesk put the chance of another hike at the 27-28 October meeting at about 15%, against 27% a day earlier in Journal du Coin’s reading. For a December hike, estimates ran from 74% (Journal du Coin, citing CME FedWatch) to about 90% (Yahoo Finance). CoinShares summed up the shift: “What has shifted is the expected timing, not the direction.” Fed chair Kevin Warsh, in Bangkok on 16 October, gave nothing away: “I don’t prejudge meetings.”

Why would the same week weigh more on ether? This is our interpretation, which the flow data support but cannot prove. Bitcoin’s institutional case rests on scarcity, and some large holders keep it through rate shocks; Strategy alone owns 848,250 BTC. Ether’s case rests on growth: fees, applications, staking income. A plain ETHA share pays its holder no staking income. With 10-year Treasuries above 5%, a growth asset that pays the fund holder nothing is among the first positions a risk committee trims.

Staked ether funds have grown, but they did not catch this week’s selling

Yield was supposed to be one answer to that. US funds that stake ether have existed since September 2025, when REX-Osprey’s ESK launched; Grayscale switched staking on in its funds in October 2025, and BlackRock listed its iShares Staked Ethereum Trust (ETHB) on Nasdaq on 12 March 2026. ETHB has gathered $885M of net inflows since then and held $1.06B at Friday’s close, SoSoValue data show. That is about 7% of all US spot ether ETF assets, against $8.09B in ETHA. From Monday to Friday, ETHB took no new money on any day, according to Farside.

On 14 October VanEck asked the SEC to withdraw the registration of its Lido staked-ether ETF. Its Form RW says the fund “does not intend to proceed with the planned distribution of the Trust’s shares” and gives no reason; our report on the VanEck Lido ETF withdrawal has the details. Coindaro’s inference, and only an inference: most demand still sits in the plain wrapper, and yield variants have widened the base of ether ETF buyers only at the margin. Nothing shows that the withdrawal caused any outflow.

Derivatives: leverage came out and nobody paid up for carry, on one exchange’s data

This is the thinnest part of the analysis. CoinGlass, the usual aggregator, could not be read for this piece, and we found no annualised CME basis for ether or bitcoin, so we give none. The futures figures below come from OKX alone, as reported by Cryptoticker on 13 October, and may not match the wider market.

Open interest in ether futures on OKX fell from $2.113B on 7 October to $1.776B on 12 October, down 15.9%. The ratio of long to short accounts dropped from 2.30 to 1.73, and volume jumped to $5.551B on 12 October. Funding on OKX’s ETH-USDT perpetual stood at +0.00255% per eight hours on Tuesday morning, about 2.8% a year (Coindaro conversion, three periods a day). Futures traded about 0.04% below spot.

Basis is the gap between the futures price and the spot price. When it is clearly positive, a fund can hold spot ether, or ETF shares, and sell futures to earn the difference. When it is flat or negative, that reason to hold ETF shares disappears. A flat basis fits the redemptions; it does not prove them, because there are no public data on how much ETHA is held against short futures.

Across exchanges, Crypto Briefing reported on 8 October that ether open interest had already fallen 11.7%, which it read as leveraged traders closing positions rather than anyone panic selling. Options lean the other way. CoinGlass data reported by TokenPost at 11:22 UTC on 17 October put ether options open interest at $5.86B, about 62% of it in calls; the largest single lines on Deribit are a $2,600 call expiring on 30 October and $2,200 and $3,200 calls for 25 December. Some traders are keeping upside bets through options while ETF holders leave.

Ether treasury companies are too small a buyer to offset the ETFs

Listed companies holding ether have not filled the gap. BitMine holds about 6.03 million ETH and trades at 0.78 times the value of its ether, according to CoinGecko’s treasuries tracker, which also shows it adding about 72,500 ETH over the past 30 days. At $2,414 that is roughly $175M (Coindaro computation), against about $955M that left US ether ETFs in October. SharpLink holds about 889,000 ETH on the same tracker.

That multiple, called mNAV, is a company’s market value divided by the value of its crypto. Below 1x, selling new shares to buy more ether shrinks each existing share’s claim on the coins, so the route that powered last year’s treasury buying is effectively closed.

Friday’s fall in crypto shares was a bitcoin-proxy shock. Strategy closed 9.56% lower at $136.83 at the US close (20:00 UTC), Bitcoin.com reported, after MSCI’s 15 October decision on companies whose assets are mainly digital holdings, explained in our report on the MSCI index rule. The final list is due on 11 November and the change takes effect after the close of 30 November. SharpLink appeared on MSCI’s preliminary list of digital asset treasury companies in its October 2025 consultation, yet nothing on the equity side offered ether a bid to offset the ETF selling.

The counter-case: a bad two weeks, not a broken trade

There are good reasons not to read too much into five sessions. Flows lag prices and are partly mechanical: they record what authorised participants did to balance supply and demand for ETF shares, not a vote on ether. When one fund carries most of the flow, a handful of large decisions can swing the weekly total. One allocator rebalancing out of ETHA could explain much of what we saw.

Scale also matters. The funds still hold 5.07% of all ether against 6.35% of all bitcoin for the bitcoin funds, a far smaller gap than the gap in dollars. Measured against the coin itself, the ether wrapper is far from marginal, and most of its $12.94B of cumulative inflows is still in place.

CoinShares, which tracks investment products worldwide, counted $434M of outflows from digital asset products “so far this week” on 16 October, a figure that includes Europe and is not split by coin. Its head of research, James Butterfill, wrote of bitcoin: “For Bitcoin, the near-term setup is therefore difficult rather than fundamentally bearish.” If rate expectations ease, the same logic would apply to ether, perhaps with more force.

Leverage has also been cleaned up. Open interest is lower, funding is positive but small, and the ETH/BTC ratio is well above its June low.

What the data cannot tell us yet

We do not know who sold ETHA, how much of the selling was hedged, what the CME basis was on Friday or how ether fared in European products this week. CoinShares’ weekly report, usually published on Mondays, should give the first split of last week’s flows by coin and by region.

What US ether ETF flows mean for European holders

US spot ether ETFs are not sold to retail investors in France or Italy, where funds holding a single crypto asset cannot carry the UCITS label. Europeans who want ether on a stock exchange use exchange-traded products listed in Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich or Milan, some of which stake the ether they hold. For them, the US figures are a gauge of institutional mood rather than a product they own. Our glossary entry on ETFs explains how the wrapper works.

What would prove this analysis wrong: thresholds and dates to watch

The thresholds below are Coindaro’s yardsticks for testing the reading above. They are not forecasts, price targets or trading levels.

• A day of net inflow into ether funds in which ETHA takes part, or a full week of outflows below about 1% of assets, roughly $150M at Friday’s net assets.
• The ETH/BTC ratio back above 0.030, the level lost on 12 October. A slide toward the June low near 0.025 would point the other way.
• Ether outside this week’s range on CoinGecko’s hourly prices, from about $2,570 at 07:00 UTC on 12 October to about $2,338 at 14:00 UTC on 15 October.
• A positive futures basis together with rising open interest, a sign that buyers are paying up again rather than only cutting risk.
• The 10-year Treasury yield back under 5%, or the odds of an October hike above 50%, either of which would change the macro backdrop for both coins.

The calendar starts on Sunday evening, when CME futures reopen. On Monday 19 October CoinShares is expected to publish its weekly flows, the first view of ether’s share of global product outflows, and US homebuilder sentiment lands the same day. Flash PMIs and the University of Michigan’s inflation expectations follow on Friday 23 October.

On Monday 26 October, Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is scheduled to reach the Hoodi testnet, the one ether-specific catalyst on the near calendar (see our Glamsterdam on Hoodi event page). The Fed meets on 27 and 28 October, with the statement on the 28th, according to the Federal Reserve calendar; its pre-meeting quiet period begins this weekend. Strategy shareholders vote on the STRC dividend on 28 October.

Further out come the US midterm elections on 3 November, MSCI’s final list on 11 November and its effective date on 30 November, and the last Fed meeting of the year on 8 and 9 December. The first ETF flow figures of the new week arrive after the US close on Monday 19 October.