US spot ether ETFs see net inflows of $106 million on first day

By Suzanne McGee

(Reuters) - The nine exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tied to the spot price of ether, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency, scooped up net inflows of $106 million on Tuesday as they began trading on U.S. stock exchanges, according to data from CF Benchmarks and several trading firms.

The funds that pulled in most of those assets were sponsored by the same firms that emerged as the biggest winners following January's debut of spot bitcoin ETFs, CF Benchmarks, a digital asset index provider, noted.

BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust ETF, led the pack with $266.5 million in inflows, closely followed by Bitwise Ethereum ETF, which had inflows of $204 million. The Fidelity Ethereum Fund attracted $71 million in assets.

The Grayscale Ethereum Trust, which converted into an ETF from a publicly traded trust on Tuesday, launched with more than $9 billion in assets and a fee well above the range of 0.20% to 0.25% of 2.5%. It saw outflows of $484 million, according to CF Benchmarks and traders. That figure is well above the first-day outflows from Grayscale's converted bitcoin ETF in January, which totaled only $95.1 million in spite of the larger size of that bitcoin ETF.

In a note published after the market's close Tuesday, crypto market-making firm Wintermute Trading noted that investors appear to be rotating out of the Grayscale ETF in favor of other, less costly offerings.

A newly launched lower-cost ETF, the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust, which levies a fee of only 0.15%, may have picked up some of those assets. It saw inflows of $15.1 million on Tuesday.

"The real money interest was strong enough to deem the launch a marginal success," noted Wintermute in its analysis of the initial trading volume of and flows into the new ETFs.

(Reporting by Suzanne McGee; editing by David Evans)