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Bitcoin (BTC) gains $66,000 following bullish ETF data
Bitcoin (BTC) rose to surpassed $66,000 early Friday, reversing Thursday’s pullback less than $65,000. At the time of writing, its price was around $66,440, 0.4% higher than 24 hours ago, while the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), which offers a measurement of the digital asset market more broad, it was up about 1.4%. Inflows into spot bitcoin ETFs turned positive again this week, recording increases for four consecutive days. This week has also seen a number of big-name institutional players reveal sizable holdings in BTC ETFs. Morgan Stanley, for example, revealed yesterday a $269.9 million investment in Grayscale’s GBTC.
Ether may have underperformed other major digital assets this year, but Coinbase says it had the potential to surprise to the upside. Ether has no significant sources of supply-side excess, the exchange said in a research report this week. “Instead, both staking and layer 2 growth have proven significant and represent a growing liquidity sink for ETH,” wrote analyst David Han. “In our opinion, ETH’s position as the center of DeFi is also unlikely to be displaced due to the widespread adoption of EVM and its Layer 2 innovations.” Coinbase also noted that the approval potential of spot US ETH ETFs cannot be overstated.
The FTM of the Fantom blockchain is one of the best performing non-meme tokens of the past week as the market looks favorably on the launch of the Sonic update and the increase in the total value locked on the protocol. According to data from CoinDesk Indices, FTM has gained 13% over the past seven days to around 81 cents, while CD20 is only 1.5% higher. In recent weeks, the Fantom Foundation has launched Sonic, its latest update, which is expected to increase transaction speeds up to 2,000 transactions per second with a finality of 1.1 seconds. This compares with just over 2.5 TPS during the past month, on-chain data shows.