Key Points
The recent increase in Ethereum’s (ETH) price has caught many by surprise, following the unexpected news that the application process for spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is advancing.
Investors had largely accepted the likelihood of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rejecting the applications.
The Impact on Ethereum and DeFi
However, when Bloomberg’s respected ETF analysts suddenly raised their approval odds from 25% to 75%, ETH experienced a significant daily price surge.
Rumors led to ETH’s price breaking past several support levels, jumping about 20% to exceed $3,800.
This unexpected rally highlights the high stakes of the spot ETH ETF approval.
This development holds more significance for decentralized finance (DeFi) than the approval of the spot Bitcoin ETFs.
While the BTC ETFs solidified Bitcoin as an institutional asset, an ETH ETF could legitimize altcoins and drive them into the next phase of the bull market rally.
With the SEC greenlighting the ETH ETF applications, Ethereum layer-2s like Optimism and Arbitrum are likely to benefit alongside Ethereum.
When the market rebounded earlier in the week, these tokens experienced similar price movements to ETH, recording high double-digit percentage price increases.
Rollups have now become a crucial component of the entire Ethereum ecosystem and are closely tied to its success.
DeFi mainstays like Uniswap or Aave, which have direct connections to EVM technology, also represent a play on Ethereum.
These DeFi heavyweights performed well in the recent market surge and will likely continue to benefit alongside Ethereum, due to the legitimacy that an ETF approval provides to projects built on this blockchain.
EVM-compatible projects and blockchains are expected to outperform closed ecosystems, which puts Avalanche and Polygon in a stronger position than Algorand, which is not yet EVM-compatible.
With the spot ETH ETF approval, EVM compatibility will become a more crucial issue than it has been over the past few years.
This will be partly due to the regulatory clarity that the ETF approval provides Ethereum, and partly due to the hype it will generate around the world’s second-largest blockchain.
Decentralized exchanges and lending protocols could benefit greatly from this development.
Until now, the much-anticipated “mainstream adoption” of decentralized finance has been elusive.
It is often not very user-friendly, not very secure, and regulators tend not to favor it.
However, an ETH ETF could change this, making investing in DeFi simpler and more secure, potentially attracting everyday users to this space in search of high returns.
The projects that offer the most functional utility will benefit the most if this happens.
For example, it would be good news for decentralized exchanges like SushiSwap or Balancer, as well as borrowing/lending protocols like Aave and Compound.
Ethereum competitors like the Solana blockchain might struggle to outperform in a post-ETH ETF environment.
Although Solana and others will likely still reach all-time highs in this cycle, as a spot ETH ETF provides much-needed clarity for decentralized blockchains, Ethereum becomes the leading blockchain in DeFi with the ETH ETF approval.
Competitors that have previously been touted as “Ethereum killers” will likely fall behind.
Ethereum has been home to new technological developments like zero-knowledge proofs, which power many Ethereum L2s, and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization experiments.
Following the approval of an ETF, we could see many more projects building on Ethereum.
Some may even transition from L1s to Ethereum rollups, seeing this as a more lucrative development direction, like Celo, which recently decided to migrate to Ethereum using OP Stack.
With all this development, we could see a raft of new token launches.
A growing number of altcoins would naturally mean growth in DeFi TVL, but it comes with a caveat.
More opportunity often means more risk, and this is particularly true in the DeFi space.
So we could also see more fraud, rug pulls, and ultimately greater losses.
For investors, this means increasing their security game and making sure they do their own research before investing in any project, regardless of how exciting and innovative it may sound.
Not only that, investors also need to avoid getting swept up in the excitement and momentum when the market does rally.
The old adage — buy the rumor, sell the news — holds true in crypto, just as it does in traditional markets.
Given the upswing we saw in ETH when the rumors around the ETF approval came out, we fully expect to see a sell-off in the coming days or weeks.
This short-term volatility is normal and welcome for a sustainable longer-term market rally.
But a prudent investor would avoid making trading decisions based on FOMO and wait for the pullback to make his next moves.