The July total sits at $205 million in net inflows, less than Ether funds have pulled in the same weeks. BlackRock's new staked ETH product drew $100 million on day one.
Bitcoin spot ETFs are on track to record their smallest monthly inflow since launch, with roughly $205 million in net creations through the last week of July, according to SoSoValue data cited by CoinDesk on Thursday. Ether ETFs pulled in $342.85 million over the same stretch. That reverses eighteen months of order in which the newer, smaller product category consistently trailed Bitcoin funds by wide margins.
The July number is technically an improvement. Bitcoin ETFs shed $2.43 billion in May and $4.52 billion in June, the two worst months the product has ever posted. A break from outflows into modest inflows should count as recovery. It doesn't feel like one because the same money that finally stopped leaving Bitcoin is now going somewhere else.
Week by week the pattern is unambiguous. In the seven days ending July 17, Ether funds added $105.4 million against Bitcoin's $75.7 million. The following week Ether pulled $103.9 million and Bitcoin managed $33.8 million. In the week ending July 28, Ether ETFs took in 37,959 ETH, about $71.2 million, while Bitcoin ETFs shed 3,170 BTC worth $200.2 million. Three consecutive weeks of net ETH inflows and net BTC outflows is not a coincidence.
BlackRock is doing most of the pulling. ETHA, its spot ether fund, absorbed 37,424 of last week's 37,959 ETH; effectively the entire category's net gain flowing through a single asset manager. The concentration reflects a specific product launch. BlackRock rolled out a staked ETH variant that generated roughly $100 million of first-day interest. Institutions that want yield alongside price exposure now have a wrapped, custodied, ETF-eligible way to get it. Retail investors have been able to stake ETH for four years; the SEC took until 2026 to let a large asset manager do it inside an exchange-traded product, and once it did, the flows arrived.
Nothing about Bitcoin has broken. The price sits above $63,000, the network is running as designed, and every previous forecast that IBIT and its peers were a passing fad has aged badly. Tom Lee's BitMine treasury vehicle crossed 4.8 per cent of every ether in circulation earlier this month through a different structure entirely. The problem is that flows are relative. Every dollar that goes into ETHA is a dollar not going into IBIT, and asset allocators rebalance by comparison rather than by absolute conviction.
Citi's macro desk cut its 12-month Bitcoin target to $82,000 in early July on the basis that ETF flows would remain flat for the rest of the year. That looks conservative rather than pessimistic given the last four weeks; the bank assumed zero net ETF inflows for the next year and Bitcoin has now delivered close to that. Analysts who last year modelled linear growth in ETF holdings have quietly rewritten the assumption.
What has actually changed is the composition of the buyer base. A Wintermute report published on 30 July found that institutional counterparties accounted for 72 per cent of spot OTC trading volume in the first half of 2026, against 61 per cent in the second half of 2025. Institutions want Bitcoin and they want Ether, but they no longer want them in the same proportions. Wall Street has run the trade of buying Bitcoin against zero-coupon inflation for eighteen months. It is now running the trade of buying Ether against tokenised yield, and the ETF wrapper is where that shows up first.
The Ether spot market is thinner than Bitcoin's by a factor of roughly four. A billion dollars of monthly inflows moves ETH price harder than five billion moves BTC. That mechanical asymmetry is part of why the rotation looks decisive on the tape even though the absolute dollar amounts remain small compared with equity ETF flows. It is also why the July numbers matter beyond the month itself. If Ether continues to attract a majority of net creations while Bitcoin trades sideways at half its 2024 target, the relative-return story that funds pitch to allocators next quarter starts with a different asset at the top.
Two trading days remain in July. Bitcoin ETFs would need a $500 million single-session inflow to move July out of its bottom rank. IBIT has produced a session like that before. Neither the funding rate on Deribit nor the perpetual basis suggests it is coming.
