Investors are pouring into Ethereum.
Exchange-traded funds for Ethereum raked in $4 billion in August alone, according to data from SoSoValue.
If that amount stays constant, it would reach $50 billion in annualised flow — surpassing the $36 billion Bitcoin ETFs pulled in last year, according to Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management.
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And there’s much more money to go around, Hougan said in an August 28 interview.
“There’s a relentless bid for Ethereum ETFs,” Hougan told podcaster Scott Melker. “It’s a flood of money into a relatively small asset, which is why the chart looks so good. And I think it’s going to continue for the rest of the year.”
The surge in investor interest for Ethereum represents a dramatic reversal for an asset that many had written off just months ago.
Last year, broker dealers said they struggled to convince investors to bet on Ethereum ETFs.
And even though Ether’s new all-time high proved short-lived, market watchers are predicting the token’s price can go anywhere from $7,500 by year-end to $20,000 at some point in the current cycle.
Instead of Bitcoin, institutional investors are deploying capital straight into Ethereum.
That’s because they’re drawn in by fresh regulation that should further cement its stablecoin dominance — nearly half of the $283 billion market lives on Ethereum — the potential $19 trillion tokenisation boom, and staking yields that Bitcoin doesn’t offer.
“The other day, I was on with a multi-billion dollar adviser. They wanted everything else besides Bitcoin,” Hougan said.
“And they ended up just buying an Ethereum ETF because that’s all they can access.”
Some, like Jan van Eck, CEO of investment manager VanECk, are even calling Ethereum the “Wall Street token.”
For years, Bitcoin advocates have been calling the top crypto digital gold.
But most professional investors don’t hold gold — meaning the narrative falls flat to most capital allocators, Hougan argued .
“Maybe 15, maybe 20% of them own gold,” Hougan said. “The other 80% just own stocks. And I think there’s a lot of people who look at Bitcoin and are like, yeah, it’s digital gold. I don’t own gold, but I do own technology stocks.”
Ethereum, meanwhile, fits their framework: it’s a tech play with cash flows, real-world utility, and has become the skeleton for tokenisation projects from BlackRock to JPMorgan.
Sprinkle the voraciousness of Ethereum treasury companies in adding Ether to their balance sheets, and a rising price should follow suit.
For Hougan, whose watching institutional money flood in at unprecedented rates, even the recent pullback is just noise.