First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Regains $66K Following Bullish ETF Data

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Bitcoin BTC$88,405.71 rose to past $66,000 early Friday, reversing Thursday's pullback below $65,000. At the time of writing, it was priced around $66,440, 0.4% higher than 24 hours ago, while the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), which offers a measurement of the wider 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 has also seen numerous big-name institutional players disclose sizable BTC ETF holdings. Morgan Stanley, for example, revealed a $269.9 million investment in Grayscale's GBTC yesterday.

Ether may have underperformed other major digital assets this year, but Coinbase says it had potential to surprise to the upside. Ether does not have significant sources of supply side overhangs, the exchange said in a research report this week. "To the contrary, both staking and layer 2 growth have proven to be meaningful 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 the EVM and its layer 2 innovations." Coinbase also noted that the potential of spot U.S. ETH ETFs being approved cannot be overstated.

The Fantom blockchain's FTM is one of the best-performing non-meme tokens of the past week as the market looks favorably on the roll-out of its Sonic upgrade and increases in the total value locked on the protocol. FTM has gained 13% in the past seven days to about 81 cents, according to CoinDesk Indices data, while the CD20 is just 1.5% higher. In the past few weeks, the Fantom Foundation has been pushing Sonic, its latest upgrade, which is expected to boost transaction speeds to 2,000 transactions per second with a 1.1-second finality. That compares with just over 2.5 TPS during the past month, on-chain data shows.

Chart of the Day

• The chart shows bitcoin's "hodler net position change," which gauges the net buying/selling activity of addresses that have held coins for six months or more.
• The metric has flipped positive for the first time since December, a sign holders have become net buyers.
• Source: Glassnode

- Omkar Godbole

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