Ethereum Takes The Lead, How It Beat Bitcoin For The First Time In This Metric

Ethereum has taken a lot of attention in the past months, as the network recently completed one of its most important updates in history by introducing EIP-1559 with the London Hard Fork. Thus, ETH’s price has been appreciating and records almost an 85% increase since it reached a low in July.

The update has been significant enough that some experts believe Ethereum has brought the bulls back to the market. Recently, crypto exchange Coinbase published its quarterly earnings report and provided data that could sustain that theory.

According to Coinbase, the platform records a total of $462 billion in trading volume during Q2, 2021. Institutions dominated this metric with $317 billion versus $145 billion from retail investors. Expert John Street Capital indicated a 4.8% increase in institutional participation compared to Q1, 2021.

This is even more significant when compared with the total percentage trading volume for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto-assets. For the first time, the second cryptocurrency by market cap managed to surpass BTC on this metric, as seen below.

The table presented by Coinbase indicates that the trading volume for Bitcoin has varied since Q2, 2020, but always stood well above Ethereum’s. On the other hand, the latter has been rising in trading volume during the same period and went from $21 billion in Q1, 2021 to $26 billion in Q2, 2021.

The data suggest that institutions could have been trading more Ethereum than Bitcoin since they were the predominant entities on the platform during this period. Further data provided by the exchange via John Street Capital reveal that 10% of the top 100 hedge funds by assets under management (AUM) are Coinbase’s clients. The report added:

BTC & ETH still make up ~50% of our trading volume. The other 50% is the long tail of all the other assets. No single one of those long tail assets accounts for more than 10% of our trading volume.

Besides Ethereum, Who Benefited The Most From Coinbase’s Growth?

Coinbase (COIN) has been rallying since the beginning of August on the back of positive expectations for their earnings report. The company exceeded them and now records a 3.14% profit in the daily chart with a buy signal based on its fundamentals, data provided by Tradingview shows.

The biggest benefit has been Cathie Wood and her ARK Fund. Since the exchange debuted on the U.S. stock, Wood’s fund has been buying massive quantities of the exchange’s shares. Now holding over 600,000.

Wood is betting big on crypto-based companies and services, as pseudonym analyst “MacroScope” noted. In addition to COIN, the fund has acquired shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), Twitter, and Square, both companies led by known Bitcoiner Jack Dorsey.

According to data published by ARK, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies’ trading volumes are on route to reaching $16 trillion in 2021, as seen below. This asset class could surpass Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (FAANG) stocks.