BTC ETFs Gain $159M, ETH ETFs Bleed Again

Highlights

US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $159 million net Thursday, with BlackRock's IBIT the only major fund posting a daily inflow
Spot Ether ETFs bled $39.24 million, their third consecutive day of net outflows
IBIT's historical net inflow has reached $64.016 billion; Fidelity's FBTC saw the biggest single-day outflow at $16.64 million
Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas argues Bitcoin ETFs could eventually hold three times the assets of gold ETFs

Bitcoin and Ether ETFs moved in opposite directions Thursday, based on SoSoValue data, underscoring a divergence in institutional appetite between the two largest crypto assets even as spot prices for both climbed. US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in a net $159 million, and BlackRock's IBIT did essentially all of the work: the fund alone pulled in $184 million, pushing its cumulative historical net inflow to $64.016 billion. Fidelity's FBTC moved the other way, shedding $16.6386 million on the day, though its lifetime net inflow still stands at $10.051 billion — a reminder that a single bad day doesn't undo years of accumulated demand.

Ether ETFs told a different story. The category posted a combined $39.2445 million in net outflows, the third straight session in the red. Fidelity's FETH was the lone bright spot among Ether funds, adding $1.8291 million and lifting its historical total to $2.221 billion, followed by VanEck's ETHV with a smaller $1.7893 million inflow and a $160 million lifetime total. The gap between the two markets — Bitcoin funds gaining new money broadly, Ether funds relying on one or two holdouts to offset broader redemptions — suggests institutional allocators are currently treating the two assets as distinct trades rather than a single "crypto" bucket.

Balchunas: Bitcoin ETFs could triple gold ETF assets

The flow divergence landed the same day Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas made a longer-term case for just how large the Bitcoin ETF category could become. Balchunas said he expects Bitcoin ETFs to eventually hold roughly three times as much in assets as gold ETFs, which collectively held about $615 billion at the end of August. Three times that figure would put Bitcoin ETF assets near $1.85 trillion — close to 19 times where the category sits today.

Balchunas's case rests less on near-term flow data than on demographics. He points to a 2026 Pew survey showing 26% of Americans aged 18-29 and 28% of those aged 30-49 have used crypto, compared with just 10% of people over 50 — a gap he expects to widen the category's asset base as younger investors inherit wealth and default to Bitcoin over gold the way older generations defaulted to bullion. Institutional adoption maturing and the crypto ETF industry's growing distribution and investor-education infrastructure round out his argument, though he frames the three-to-five-year timeline as a long-run bull case rather than a near-term price call. That case has already shown up in shorter-run flow data too: Bitcoin ETFs posted a $643 million inflow earlier this year, their biggest since January, before cooling into Thursday's more modest $159 million haul.

For now, the split between Bitcoin's broad inflow day and Ether's third straight outflow session is a more immediate signal than any long-run projection: allocators appear to be rotating capital toward Bitcoin exposure specifically, even as both assets trade higher on the day alongside the broader market rally.

That divergence is worth watching over the coming week. A single day of Ether outflows is normal noise; three in a row, even a modest amount each day, starts to look like a deliberate reallocation rather than routine rebalancing. Whether that trend reverses once markets fully digest Friday's macro news — a resolved rate decision and a cooling oil price, both of which tend to support risk assets broadly — will say more about near-term institutional positioning than Balchunas's decade-scale thesis on Bitcoin versus gold, though a repeat of Bitcoin funds' own recent snapback to $216.7 million in inflows after a Friday outflow would be a reasonable near-term test case to watch.