Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF Investments Have Already Topped 2024—Will It Last?

Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded products pulled in $3.17 billion worth of funds last week before spot markets tanked on Friday during tense trade talks between the U.S. and China.

Bitcoin funds pulled in $2.6 billion and Ethereum funds saw $338 million worth of new deposits, according to a report from crypto asset manager CoinShares.

Last week's inflows have brought the year-to-date crypto fund deposits to a record $48.7 billion, meaning crypto ETPs have already beat last year's record flows.

There's some evidence that the crash had an impact on ETF holdings, but not much. "Friday saw little reaction with a paltry $159m outflows," noted CoinShares Head of Research James Butterfill.

He added that it's unlikely retail traders were the ones selling their Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF shares on Friday.

"We’ve found that retail holders of ETPs tend to be much 'stickier' than institutional investors, who often engage in basis trading," he told Decrypt, referring to traders who buy long spot and short futures. "Therefore, I’d expect most of the outflows to come from institutional investors who were likely washed out of the basis trade after this recent sell-off, rather than from retail holders—although there was no evidence of this on Friday flows, so it seems that the institutional basis trades (who really move the flows) were not impacted much."

At the time of writing, users on Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt parent company Dastan, think there's little chance optimism will return in the next two days. Roughly 62% of predictors think the Crypto Fear & Greed Index will still be below 55 on October 15. That number has jumped by more than 13% in the past day.

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index sank as low as 24 on Sunday, solidly in the "extreme fear" range. As of Monday morning, it's at 38 and moved back into the "fear" zone.

Even before the flash crash, Butterfill said there were an awful lot of ETF shares changing hands last week.

"Weekly volumes on digital asset ETPs were the largest on record at a whopping $53 billion for the week, double the 2025 weekly average, with Friday volumes being the largest daily on record at $15.3 billion," he wrote. "Total assets under management following the tariff announcement fell by 7% from last week's peak to $242 billion."

At the time of writing, Bitcoin has rebounded nearly 3% in the last day to about $114,200. Over the weekend, it briefly dipped below $110,000—a level BTC hadn't seen in two weeks.

The recovery for Ethereum has been even more pronounced. On Monday morning, ETH has surged more than 7% to $4,118 after spending the majority of the weekend below $4,000, according to crypto price aggregator CoinGecko.

Leveraged traders on perpetual contracts on centralized exchanges bore the brunt of the Friday crash, according to Marcin Kazmierczak, co-founder of crypto oracle company RedStone.

"Within hours, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization fell from around $4.3 trillion to approximately $2.7 trillion, wiping out nearly $600 billion in paper value," he told Decrypt. "The flash crash in token prices caused collateral values to plummet momentarily, triggering massive liquidation cascades."

He pointed out that the carnage was less severe on decentralized exchanges and DeFi projects.

"Firstly, major oracles such as Chainlink and RedStone kept reporting price feeds from multiple venues, being immune from flash crashes at some exchanges," he said. "Secondly, there was simply less leveraged on-chain positions."