Ether Capped a 26.44% Week as U.S. Spot ETFs Drew $2.18 Billion

Ether ended July 20, 2025 with a 26.44% seven-day gain in CoinMarketCap’s historical snapshot, while bitcoin was down 1.52% over the provider’s corresponding rolling window. The same snapshot priced ETH at $3,759.47 and BTC at $117,300.79. That 27.96-percentage-point performance gap marked a sharp rotation toward the second-largest cryptoasset after bitcoin’s record-setting move earlier in July.

The date matters because July 20 was a Sunday, when U.S. exchange-traded funds were closed but cryptocurrency continued trading globally. The market move therefore capped a full crypto trading week; it was not a new ETF subscription session or a regulated-market close.

A venue record confirms the move

Binance’s ETHUSDT spot candle for the UTC day opened at $3,592, reached $3,824.56, fell to $3,579.13 and closed at $3,756.69. The close was 4.59% above the open by Coinburn’s calculation. Comparing the July 20 close with Binance’s July 13 close of $2,972.03 gives a seven-day close-to-close advance of 26.40%.

Bitcoin moved the other way on the same venue and measurement. Binance’s BTCUSDT close declined from $119,086.64 on July 13 to $117,265.12 on July 20, a 1.53% decrease. The Binance calculations closely match CoinMarketCap’s displayed weekly percentages, although the datasets differ in construction: Binance covers one USDT-quoted exchange market and defines days in UTC, while CoinMarketCap aggregates markets and publishes provider snapshots.

Neither is a consolidated official close. Crypto trades continuously across fragmented venues, USDT is designed to track the dollar but is not the same instrument as a bank-dollar pair, and prices elsewhere could differ.

ETF demand preceded the Sunday advance

Farside Investors’ issuer-level table recorded $259.0 million, $192.3 million, $726.6 million, $602.0 million and $402.5 million of net inflows into U.S. spot ether ETFs from July 14 through July 18. Coinburn’s sum is $2.1824 billion. BlackRock’s ETHA accounted for $1.7637 billion, or 80.8%, of that total.

Those figures describe estimated net creations and redemptions in listed U.S. funds during five market sessions. They are not ETF trading volume, direct exchange purchases of ETH or flows recorded on July 19 and July 20. The timing supports an institutional-demand backdrop before the weekend rally, but it does not prove that ETF flows caused the price increase. Authorized participants can use inventory, hedges and creation mechanisms whose transaction timing is not visible in the daily table.

Corporate demand was also part of the contemporaneous narrative. A July 17 SEC filing showed that SharpLink Gaming expanded the maximum size of its at-the-market equity program from $1 billion to $6 billion and permitted forward sales. SharpLink had already identified ETH as its primary treasury reserve asset. The amendment created financing capacity; it did not establish that $6 billion had been raised or spent on ether by July 20.

What July 20 established

The defensible event-day conclusion is that ether completed an unusually strong seven-day advance, materially outperformed bitcoin and did so after a record-setting run of U.S. spot-ETF inflows. The records do not identify all buyers, separate spot demand from leverage, or establish how durable the rotation would be.

Later confirmation

On July 21, CoinShares reported $2.12 billion of weekly inflows into Ethereum investment products globally, nearly double its prior record of $1.2 billion. That later report corroborated the institutional scale visible by July 20, but its product universe and methodology differ from Farside’s U.S.-only ETF table; the $2.12 billion and $2.1824 billion totals should not be treated as interchangeable.