Top Highlights

• Over the 121-year old facade of the New York Stock Exchange, a freshly printed Ethereum ETF banner hung like a hoisted pirate flag. Tourists stopped, stared, and pointed. The younger ones explained what Ethereum was to their families, and guessed about the ETF part.
• The mood was triumphant—and with good reason: In their first week of trading, spot ETH ETFs kicked off with a “very solid” start, according to analysts, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars.
• But among Manhattan’s banking elite, a mild unease stewed. These people weren’t crypto novices; they’d brought spot Bitcoin ETFs to the masses months before, with great success. But Ethereum was a different beast, and some were having trouble pinning it down. Ethereum was another cryptocurrency, sure, but it wasn’t the cryptocurrency. It was a type...
• One way to explain it to TradFi clients, as I overheard on Friday, is to liken ETH, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, to stock in iOS, Apple’s operating system for iPhone apps.
• Some bankers present at the bell ringing ceremony were there to dip their toes, in a sense, into the still-murky cryptoverse. Maybe they’d get involved with crypto one day, but obstacles remained—namely, how to get their skeptical colleagues to understand products like Ethereum on a conceptual level.

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