By
Chimamanda U. Martha
May 14th, 2024
The open interest in Ether Futures has spiked by 50% while the Ethereum buy call options have also shot up significantly. More importantly, institution buying has resumed in Ethereum with its improving on-chain fundamentals.
The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) has moved past all resistances to hit a new all-time high above $1550. The recent price rally in Ethereum comes just ahead of the launch of the CME Ether Futures scheduled on February 7, 2021. The momentum is already picking up as ETH Futures open interest jumps a massive over 50% in the last 24 hours.
$ETH futures open interest hits new all time high of $5.60 billion, up 47% in the past 24 hours. CME Ether futures also launches in just 5 days.
Chart: @bybt_com pic.twitter.com/dlofIL5fsA
— Bloqport (@Bloqport) February 3, 2021
With its current move, Ethereum has also topped over 100% just within the first month of 2021. At press, ETH is trading at a price of $1529 with a market cap of $176 billion. This also makes Ethereum more valuable than some of the leading financial banking institutions like Citigroup.
The Ethereum whales have reportedly played a major role in taking the ETH price to new highs. Besides, the latest ETH price rally comes soon after the world’s largest digital asset manager Grayscale announced the re-opening of the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) for accredited investors. Interestingly, it turns out that Grayscale has purchased another 24,796 ETH worth around $38 million, in the last 24 hours.
Grayscale adds 24,796 $ETH worth $37.8 million over the past 24 hours, bringing their total ETH AUM to $4.5 billion.
Chart: @bybt_com pic.twitter.com/D2c1z03eh5
— Bloqport (@Bloqport) February 2, 2021
As of now, Grayscale holds more than 2.96 million ETH coins as the total assets under management for ETHE surge above $4.0 billion. Interestingly, as it turns out, just before the latest rally, the options market has been dominated by buy calls. Nearly 80% of Deribit’s ETH volumes were flooded with buy calls.
#ETH 1-month VIX has reset to levels last seen in early January while price is stabilising close to ATH.
80% of @DeribitExchange volume today is dominated by calls, this looks like it's about to pop 🚀📈 pic.twitter.com/sHN5JnB2jZ— Laevitas (@laevitas1) February 2, 2021
Ethereum Fundamentals Improve but JPMorgan Seeks Caution
The Ethereum on-chain fundamentals continue to improve every passing day. As big players continue to accumulate more Ethereum, the ETH supply at exchanges continue to drop at a very fast rate. citing data from CryptoQuant, Bloqport reports:
“$ETH held on exchanges just hit an historic low. Over the past 30 days, 3.75M ETH worth $4.97 billion left exchanges, possibly for staking, DEXs or cold storage.”
Apart from a massive quantity of ETH moving to cold storage, a lot of it also goes to staking on Ethereum 2.0. On-chain data provider Glassnode also stated that more than $4.0 billion worth of ETH is now available for staking on the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contracts.
📈 #Ethereum $ETH Total Value in the ETH 2.0 Deposit Contract just went above $4,000,000,000.
Current value: $4,019,518,393
View metric:https://t.co/1ezmu1GKcj pic.twitter.com/Rd5hEcEaBW
— glassnode alerts (@glassnodealerts) February 2, 2021
While the bullish momentum around ETH builds up, JPMorgan has recently advised caution. The banking giant says that euphoria around the launch of CME Ether Futures can flip upside down. JPMorgan strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou told Bloomberg that the launch of Ether futures can lead to “negative price dynamics” leading to a correction.
The strategist thinks that Ether Futures will give big players the opportunity to hedge the crypto just like they did with the launch of CME Bitcoin Futures after Bitcoin touched $20K levels in December 2017. It will interesting to see what price action follows ahead in Ethereum (ETH). Currently, with a new all-time high, Ethereum has entered a price discovery mode. Hopefully, the bull rage continues.