Here’s why institutional interest in Eth has hiked so rapidly

It is safe to say that Ethereum is no longer playing second fiddle to Bitcoin. While there might be a massive difference between their market capitalizations, the community engagement is almost similar, with Ethereum taking the center-stage sometimes too.

In fact, the scale of the latest institutional demand for Ethereum can be observed by the activity registered by the newly launched ETH CME Futures.

According to Glassnode, the daily trading volume climbed to a total of $75.8 million on 16 February, almost doubling from the volumes registered on the 12th, which was around $40 million.

There were other prominent indicators as well. In a recent interview, Meltem Demirors of CoinShares suggested that towards the beginning of February, Ethereum investment products registered 80% total inflows, worth about $175 million, with such institutional interest never seen before.

A similar narrative was also put forward by Coinbase’s annual review of 2020. In the same, the crypto-exchange suggested that a growing number of its institutional clients are taking a position in Ether, with these particular clients having predominantly bought Bitcoin in 2020.

Ki-Young Ju, CEO of CryptoQuant, recently shed some light on three massive ETH outflows witnessed last year. He speculated that these might be OTC deals for institutional investors, similar to Coinbase outflows. Young Ju might not be far from being accurate.

Over time, the amount of Ethereum held on exchanges has rapidly fallen, indicative of the same hodling sentiment common with Bitcoin.