Ethereum (ETH) bulls and bears were locked in a tug of war for almost 4 weeks, but the bulls have emerged dominant this week, with Blackrock ETF inflows surge pushing the price.
ETH price action managed to break out of its range-bound performance courtesy of the strong rally this week.
The ETH price breakout was driven by aggressive spot and institutional inflows. Speaking of the latter, BlackRock was at the forefront of that movement, judging by its strong liquidity injection.
According to Farside, Blackrock acquired over $300 million worth of ETH on Thursday. This was almost double the amount that the company injected into the same cryptocurrency during the previous day.
The total ETH ETF inflows on Thursday amounted to $382.1 million. ETF flows were on track to conclude the week on a positive streak.
Aside from robust institutional flows, the bullish ETH price action was also backed by aggressive accumulation.
Ethereum (ETH) accumulator addresses registered their highest spike in inflows observed in more than 12 months.
Despite the aggressive surge in accumulation, market data also revealed a sizable surge in ETH short positions.
While this signaled that there was a rise in expectations of a retracement, it may have contributed to the bullish momentum.
Ethereum (ETH) Short Liquidations Surge Above $215 million
ETH shorts liquidations surged past $215 million in the last 24 hours, which was the highest daily number of shorts wiped out in the last 8 weeks.
This signalled that there were a large number of traders anticipating a retracement, especially after the sideways price action that prevailed since the second week of May.
The large number of shorts indicated an expectation of structure breakdown after previous failed rally attempts.
The massive liquidations underscored a short squeeze scenario, which may have further contributed to bullish momentum.
Still on the derivatives side of things, open interest surged above $40 billion. This brought it closer to its open interest ATH territory, which it achieved in June, meaning that a lot of investors were betting on a directional move.
Interestingly, funding rates switched from favouring shorts to longs in the last 24 hours. This signalled that investors have been executing long positions to move with the trend or to cover the shortfalls from the liquidated short positions.
The switch to long positions could also pave the way for another major liquidation event, but this time for longs.
Such an outcome could potentially contribute to a major pullback, also possibly driven by heavy profit-taking after the recent gains.
ETH price was already overbought at press time, with price retracing slightly below $3,000. However, sustained momentum could possibly for higher gains, especially if spot holders show an unwillingness to sell.
Also, this time, Ethereum (ETH) achieved higher percentage gains than its main rival, SOL price. Investors were keen on establishing which of the two might offer better returns, and the latest market reaction offered a clear answer.
Top Crypto Exec Says Ethereum is Better than Solana
Tom Lee, the chairman of Bitmain’s board of directors, recently sided with Ethereum during a recent interview.
When asked whether Solana would eat into Ethereum’s market share, he pointed out heavy institutional adoption.
According to Lee, key sectors of the traditional financial markets could potentially fuel robust growth for Ethereum.
He noted some key areas of adoption, such as JPMorgan’s new stablecoin built on Ethereum, as well as the deployment of tokenized real-world assets, especially for the U.S stock market.
The Bitmain executive noted that the predicted stablecoin growth on Ethereum could experience exponential growth in utility and Ethereum (ETH) adoption.
As far as coin performance was concerned, SOL weekly price action was up by about 7.8% at the time of observation.
In contrast, ETH rallied by almost 16%, which means investors favored the latter compared to the former.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2025/07/12/eth-breakout-to-4k-imminent-as-blackrock-etf-records-300m-inflows/