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Data shows the Ethereum futures volume has flipped that of Bitcoin, a sign that strong speculative interest is flooding into the asset.
According to data from the analytics firm Glassnode, Ethereum has managed to surpass Bitcoin in terms of futures trading volume again. The trading volume here naturally refers to the amount of trading that a given asset saw on the different centralized exchanges during the past day. In the context of the current topic, the volume associated with the futures market specifically is of interest.
Below is a table that shows how this metric compared between Bitcoin and Ethereum at the time of Glassnode’s post.
As is visible, Bitcoin registered a futures trading volume of $67.5 billion, notably lower than the $104.2 billion figure witnessed by Ethereum. This isn’t something that ordinarily happens, as the number one cryptocurrency usually observes more speculative demand than ETH or the altcoins.
In the same table, data of a few other futures-related indicators is also shown. The BTC Open Interest, a metric that keeps track of the total amount of futures positions currently open on all derivatives platforms, sat at $64.2 billion at the time of the post.
The same indicator for ETH was at $32.2 billion, indicating that the original digital asset was still far ahead in terms of total market positioning. That said, the 24-hour change in the metric stood at a positive 6.1% for Ethereum, while Bitcoin saw a drop of 1.4%
The fresh demand for ETH has come as its price has broken away from the market, accompanied by a strong wave of inflows into the spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Interestingly, while all this attention came toward the cryptocurrency, its average Funding Rate still didn’t turn too positive. The Funding Rate is an indicator that keeps track of the amount of periodic fees that traders on the futures market are exchanging between each other.
When this metric is green, it means the long investors are paying a premium to the short ones in order to hold onto their positions. Such a trend implies the presence of a bullish mentality among the traders.
From the table, it’s apparent that the Funding Rate stood at 0.0096% for Ethereum even after the spike in futures trading volume. This was less than Bitcoin’s value of 0.01%. Thus, while fresh positioning is occurring for ETH, it seems the investors are still not getting too optimistic.
“This setup leans bullish: strong speculative interest, rising OI, and no signs of overheating yet,” notes the analytics firm.
At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading around $3,600, up almost 21% in the last week.
