Ethereum Shorts Rekt as ETH Tops $4,500 for First Time Since 2021

Ethereum’s momentous surge continued Tuesday afternoon, with the price of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap topping $4,500 for the first time since 2021.

ETH has surged by 26% over the last week alone, pushing its 30-day gain to over 50%. Compare that to Bitcoin, which is up about 6% on the week and roughly flat over the last month.

Traders betting against Ethereum are feeling the pain Tuesday, with over $104 million worth of liquidations on ETH short positions over the past 24 hours, per data from CoinGlass. Ethereum leads all crypto liquidations with about $154 million worth during that span, out of $403 million of zapped positions across all assets.

Ethereum’s major surge has been buoyed by billions in net inflows to ETH’s exchange traded products. 

The second-largest crypto asset has posted just three days of net ETF outflows since July began, and broke its one-day record of inflows on Monday, fueled by more than $1 billion worth of investments.

Those inflows were led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA), which accounted for nearly 63% of the intake on Monday, almost singlehandedly matching the asset’s previous inflow record of $726 million.

That figure dwarfs Bitcoin’s $170 million of net inflows from Monday, and is the continuation of a theme which has seen ETH ETFs outpacing their Bitcoin counterparts over the course of the last month. 

Ethereum is also being gobbled up by new publicly traded treasury companies, highlighted by aggressive accumulation from firms like SharpLink Gaming and BitMine Immersion Technologies.

The pair hold the top two largest Ethereum treasuries, accounting for nearly $8 billion in ETH according to data from StrategicETHReserve. And those treasuries are only going to get larger, propelled by BitMine’s fundraising efforts, which were upsized by more than $20 billion on Tuesday as it seeks more Ethereum for its balance sheet. 

SharpLink too is raising more funds, adding nearly $900 million over the last week after it announced a $400 million direct offering on Monday.

The combination of treasury firms and ETF inflows has led to about 8% of the entire ETH supply getting snatched up as of Tuesday, an increase of 5% since April when no publicly traded firms had yet created strategic Ethereum reserves.

At its current price of $4,502, Ethereum remains down about 8% from its all-time high mark of $4,878 set in November 2021, per CoinGecko.

Predictors on Myriad believe it will eclipse that mark before the end of 2025, with odds of ETH hitting $5K by year’s end up to 77.7%—a gain of more than 30% in the last week as the asset’s price rises. (Disclaimer: Myriad Markets is a product of Decrypt‘s parent company, DASTAN.)