Today in crypto, crypto funds recorded a bumper week of inflows amid concerns around a US government shutdown, a Multicoin Capital executive said the stablecoin-focused Genius Act will finally give traditional banks a run for their money, and DefiLlama announced the delisting of Aster perpetual trading volume data.
Crypto funds smash records with $5.95 billion inflows amid shutdown concerns
Cryptocurrency investment products recorded their highest-ever inflows last week, as the US government shutdown fueled a rally in spot crypto markets.
Global crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) recorded $5.95 billion of inflows in the week ending Friday — the largest ever seen — CoinShares reported on Monday.
“We believe this was due to a delayed response to the FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] interest rate cut, compounded by very weak employment data […], and concerns over US government stability following the shutdown,” CoinShares’ head of research, James Butterfill, said.
The record inflows came amid an overall bullish trend in crypto markets, which led to Bitcoin (BTC) registering a new historic high above $125,000 on Saturday.
With inflows reaching $5.95 billion, crypto ETPs surpassed the previous $4.4 billion record from mid-July by 35%.
Unlike the previous record inflows, which were almost equally distributed between Bitcoin and Ether (ETH), the latest gains were heavily dominated by BTC, with Bitcoin funds attracting a record-breaking $3.6 billion.
“Despite prices closing in on all-time highs during the week, investors did not choose to buy short investment products,” CoinShares Butterfill noted.
Ether ETPs saw inflows totaling $1.48 billion, pushing year-to-date inflows to another record of $13.7 billion, which was close to triple that of last year, Butterfill said.
Solana (SOL) ETP inflows ranked third at $706.5 million, while XRP (XRP) added $219.4 million, with both setting records, according to CoinShares.
GENIUS Act could mark the end of the banking rip-off: Multicoin
The stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, which was enacted in July, will trigger an exodus of deposits from traditional bank accounts into higher-yield stablecoins, according to the co-founder of Multicoin Capital.
“The GENIUS Bill is the beginning of the end for banks’ ability to rip off their retail depositors with minimal interest,” Multicoin Capital’s co-founder and managing partner, Tushar Jain, posted to X on Saturday.
“Post Genius Bill, I expect the big tech giants with mega distribution (Meta, Google, Apple, etc) to start competing with banks for retail deposits,” Jain added, arguing that they would offer better stablecoin yields with a better user experience for instant settlement and 24/7 payments over traditional banking players.
He noted that banking groups tried to “protect their profits” in mid-August by calling on regulators to close a so-called loophole that may allow stablecoin issuers to pay interest or yields on stablecoins through their affiliates.
DefiLlama delisting Aster perpetual futures volume data
DefiLlama, a platform for decentralized finance analytics, is delisting volume data for the Aster decentralized exchange platform (DEX) due to data integrity concerns, according to 0xngmi, a pseudonymous co-founder of DeFiLlama.
0xngmi said the perpetual futures trading volume on Aster nearly matches Binance perpetual futures trading volume and shared a chart showing that the correlation ratio between the volume data of the two exchanges is about one. 0xngmi added:
“Aster doesn’t make it possible to get lower-level data, such as who is making and filling orders, so until we can get that data to verify if there’s wash trading, Aster perpetual volumes will be delisted.”
The Aster perpetual DEX has captured narrative attention in the crypto community as a challenger to the popular Hyperliquid perpetual futures exchange. Aster is also linked to Binance co-founder CZ.
cointelegraph.com