Live: Eric Balchunas on The $ETH ETF Launch

Bakelization, after a long, chaotic roller coaster of drama, surprises, and plot twists, we have arrived at Tuesday, the 23rd, the first day of the Spa Ether ETFs. And at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time, we have concluded the first day of trading of the ETFs. That is that day is behind us. Thank God that day is behind us. We've got on the show today Eric Balchounis, one of the Bloomberg ETF boys, back for the crypto industry's second ETF debut. Eric, welcome back to Bankless. How did today go? Were there any surprises? Did we overperform? Did we underperform? What were their performance expectations at all? Tell us like first thoughts. What stands out the most?

Uh I'd solid is what I would go. I would say a solid A.

Maybe not an A plus, you know. I'd say

our prediction was that these things would take or do about 20% of what the spot Bitcoin ETFs did. And they did 23%.

So, but they you know, it could have been worse. Uh that they could, you know.

The big thing that had was in the back of my mind the whole time was the ETH Futures ETFs.

If you remember, early flopped to me. They were almost like an embarrassment.

Like nobody cared.

And the Bitcoin Futures GTF did really well.

Now, granted, the ETH Futures launched post SBF in the dark times,

whereas the Bitcoin futures launched in like the peak the 69,000 peak of 2021.

But still,

I would say anybody who's an ether person should be really happy with this. This is solid.

Um

20%

may seem like, well, okay, you know, I'm a little jealous,

but the Bitcoin ETS was the biggest launch ever.

And like beyond normalcy, like

almost like an anomaly in physics.

So

it'd be like saying, hey, would you like 20% of Bill Gates' worth, uh net worth? And you'd be like, hell yeah.

Like I would lock into that, right?

That's sort of what this is like.

I would not compare it,

um

that's how big the Bitcoin ETFs were.

Compared to a normal launch, I mean, these blew these blew everybody away.

So, like, for example, even the one that did the least good, which was 21 shares, had 8 million in trading.

That's more than 90% of new ETF volume on day one.

So even the the last one blew away the normal the norm. So

um, and all it all went well. There was no hiccups, no weird pricing or

nothing that I saw. So um

I I think it went really well smoothly and solid, would have is how I'd put it.

I will take a solid A as a formerly B student. I'll definitely take the A. Uh what was the final volume number for the day? What did we we passed a billion dollars in trading volume cumulatively? What what did we end up at?

One billion or one spot oh eight three, so just shy of 1.1 billion.

Um, and notable is that

all like all of them saw double over 10 million except for 21 shares.

That's good. Like there was a

there's a strong middle class here. It wasn't like BlackRock did like almost everything and then everybody else was like starving.

Um they all did pretty well. It was a nice cascade from like

grayscale

uh to blackrock to fidelity down to 21 shares.

The one thing also to note is that the

grayscale

ETH ETF, which was a is is probably going to be like an unlock, sort of like GBTC,

Right.

that has $450 million of trading. That's probably mostly outflows.

Good news is

it's well overwhelmed

by the inflows of the other guys.

Um, so you have 600 and something million

net

um the other guys did over ETH, which that's probably gonna at some point it's a good chunk of that's gonna be inflows. So look for some decent, chunky inflows over the next couple days.

Yeah, and so I think there's two big metrics that everyone's looking at right now. I think we started the day at $3,500.

Uh on Ether, dropped down $100 at the bottom, but we were staying flat overall on the day. And so you're saying that we're getting basically complete outflows out of grayscale, which is to be expected. We saw this coming because this is what happened with Bitcoin ETF.

Everything else was inflows. You and James on Twitter have been talking a lot about uh volume, trading volume, which I know is like a very important metric of health for these ETFs that trade. But what about net inflows? Under uh do we not have any how do we have any sort of indication about like with the inflows of these things?

Well, I I would just I don't know if you can bring up the tweet I just put out like five minutes ago.

Sure.

This is not quite the final numbers, but it's close.

Boom. Uh no. Oh, that's the next one. That's my