Ether Mania Grips Market

In case you missed it! Our recap of last week’s reports:

• DeFi Analytics 8th August 2025
• Bybit x Block Scholes Quarterly Report: Altcoin season and the evolving role of Bitcoin
• Block Scholes x Bybit Crypto Derivatives

Daily Updates:

• Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) stock rallied 5% in yesterday’s trading session as the ETH treasury firm filed with the SEC to expand its at-the-market equity program by another $20B, to fund more purchases of ETH. The company had already been authorised to issue $4.5B to purchase Ether tokens, of which only $723 is left, according to the filing. 
• $20B worth of ETH at current prices would be equivalent to 4,347,826 tokens, or 3.6% of the total 120M circulating supply of ETH.
• That demand crunch is also being amplified by a wave of other institutions looking to deploy dry powder in order to expand their ETH treasuries. SharpLink Gaming announced over the weekend plans to enter “into securities purchase agreements for an aggregate of $400M with five global institutional investors”.
• After recording their first $1B inflow day on Monday, ETH Spot ETFs also continue to show an incredible appetite to purchase more tokens. Yesterday, the nine products purchased $523.9M, once more outperforming inflows into BTC ETFs which stood at a far smaller $65.9M. 
• This wave of demand has supported ETH’s spot price, which has surged 8% over the past 24 hours, almost reaching $4,680 — bringing it within 6% of its November 2021 all-time high. 
• With spot price currently trading at $4.6K, perpetual swap funding rates for ETH shot up to 0.02% on an eight-hourly basis, indicating demand from traders to pay for leveraged exposure to further upward moves in spot. The futures-yield term structure also continues to remain inverted, as 7-day yields are 3 percentage points higher than 180-day yields. 
• In ETH options markets however, short-tenor volatility smiles were unable to maintain the 5-6% premium towards out-of-the-money call options of yesterday, with put-call skew falling to 4.1%, a still bullish premium for OTM calls.

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• In macro, the BLS’s latest CPI report portrayed a very mixed picture on the state of inflation in the US. Underlying inflation, or the core CPI, rose 0.3% month-over-month. Though in line with expectations, that was the fastest MoM increase since January 2025. The year-over-year core CPI exceeded expectations of 3%, rising instead by 3.1% – the highest since February 2025. On the other hand, the headline inflation figure came in below expectations at 2.7%. 
• Perhaps more interesting than the main numbers is that despite the concern that President Trump’s tariffs would shoot up inflation in goods, the report actually showed an increase in services inflation, and a mixed rise in goods. 
• Supercore services, defined as services inflation excluding food, energy and housing, a gauge that was once heavily tracked by the Fed, rose 0.48% — the highest increase since January, and second largest in 16 months. The jump in services was mainly due to higher airfares and dental services. The jump in shelter prices by 0.2% on the month “was the primary factor in the all items monthly increase”.
• Apparel (clothing) prices edged up only 0.1%, while the prices for toys, which had increased in June’s report rose slightly by 0.2%. Appliance prices fell 0.9% on the month, though household furnishings and supplies rose 0.7%, after a 1% rise in June, indicating some tariff-pass through in goods. 

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• Despite the mixed signals in the report, markets overall took the report as an indication that the Federal Reserve will have space to cut interest rates in September. Market-implied odds of a 25bps rate cut are currently at 98.4%, compared with 93.9% a day earlier. 
• Two-year treasury yields fell four bps to 3.73%, while US equity indexes such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 both hit all-time highs. 
• Speaking on Fox Business, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said “Not only were there fantastic numbers, a lot of economists said well I got the number right, but I missed the components. Everyone was expecting goods inflation, but there was actually this very odd services inflation … which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with tariffs”. 
• Bessent added “if we had the original numbers [NFP] the Fed could have been cutting in June, July, so I think the real thing now to think about is should we get a 50 basis-point rate cut in September to make up for the delay and lack of data”. 

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• Crypto exchange Bullish, created by Block.one – the company that raised $4B in 2018 to launch the EOS blockchain – is set to list on the New York Exchange at a valuation around $4.8B. EOS peaked at nearly $19 in 2018 but has since fallen to about $0.54.
• Filings show Block.one handed its remaining Bullish stake to a firm tied to CEO Brendan Blumer and shifted a $500M loan to a Cayman entity. 

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• Grayscale, a crypto asset manager, has registered Cardano Trust ETF and Hedera Trust ETF in Delaware to its list of entities yesterday evening.
• The SEC has already acknowledged NYSE Arca’s 19b-4 form for Grayscale’s proposed spot Cardano ETF and Nasdaq’s for the Hedera ETF earlier this year. Grayscale also holds registrations for other altcoin investment trusts, including Dogecoin, Filecoin, Avalanche, and Bittensor. 
• Separately, Grayscale launched two new investment trusts on Tuesday offering exposure to DeepBook and Walrus, both native to the Sui blockchain ecosystem.

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• Eden Network, a protocol focused on reducing the negative effects of maximum extractable value (MEV) on Ethereum, announced today that it is winding down operations.
• Launched in 2021, Eden provided Ethereum miners with tools to optimize MEV through transaction prioritization. The protocol gained brief prominence as an MEV-Boost relay operator following Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake in September 2022.
• Eden cited an increasingly competitive and costly environment in the relay and block-building space as the main factor for its closure. As part of a token retirement program, the network will distribute its entire treasury of 2,000 ETH to EDEN token holders.

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day:

Figure 1. BTC at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes

Figure 2. ETH at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes

Figure 3. BTC 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes

Figure 4. ETH 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes