Tag: Business – Decrypt

Bitcoin has fallen over the past week, but its declines have been less severe than the broader equity drawdown since the Iran conflict began on February 28.

The world’s largest crypto traded around $68,000 on Sunday, down roughly 2% over the past 24 hours and about 6% over the past seven days, according to CoinGecko data. 

The move comes as the Iran war entered its fourth week, pushing crude prices higher and contributing to a broader pullback in risk assets by Friday.

That geopolitical backdrop worsened over the weekend after U.S. President Donald Trump gave Iran a 48-hour ultimatum to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face U.S. strikes on Iranian power plants, prompting Tehran to threaten to completely shut the vital oil shipping route and target U.S.-linked energy infrastructure across the region.

U.S. stocks have fallen for four consecutive weeks, with the S&P 500 last week breaking below its 200-day moving average, a key technical level closely watched by institutional investors, for the first time since March of last year.

Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq are down about 4% to 5% this month, according to Google Finance data.

Energy has been the only major sector to rise during the period as oil prices begin climbing back toward $100 a barrel.

Still, Bitcoin’s monthly decline has been more modest than the drop in equities, posting a loss of just 0.2%, a shift some market participants attribute to earlier deleveraging in the crypto market and continued institutional participation.

“After undergoing several rounds of deleveraging in recent months, Bitcoin has materially outperformed traditional assets on a risk-adjusted basis since the start of the Iran war,” John O’Loghlen, managing director for APAC at Coinbase, told Decrypt. 

He added that as oil becomes “an active transmission channel for global inflation,” the firm is seeing rising institutional inflows into crypto assets and U.S. Bitcoin ETFs.

“There are early signs the crypto market might now be past peak pessimism,” O’Loghlen said. “However, stronger participation will be required for a more durable rally.”

While macro conditions are driving broader market sentiment, experts say the crypto market itself is flashing signs of resilience rather than heavy distribution.

“The crypto market is in a steady consolidation phase, with clear signs of institutional strength and accumulation,” Nischal Shetty, founder of WazirX, told Decrypt. 

He added that Bitcoin has been holding support near the lower end of its recent range while facing resistance near recent highs, signalling buyers remain active despite macro uncertainty.

A mid-March ChainCheck report from VanEck found that long-term holder selling has slowed, with transfer volume declining across older coins, a sign that experienced investors are reducing distribution pressure.

Analysts say the next move for Bitcoin will likely depend on macroeconomic data in the coming week, including flash PMI readings from major economies and further moves in oil prices, which are increasingly shaping expectations for inflation and interest rates.

Prediction market giant Kalshi has raised a $1 billion round and, with it, clinched a $22 billion valuation, a person familiar with the matter told Decrypt. The news was originally reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The deal has roughly doubled Kalshi’s valuation from its last round in December, when investors valued the business at $11 billion. That round was led by Paradigm and included investments from Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest, and venture capital giants Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.

This new funding round was led by Coatue Management, the source said. Kalshi declined to comment when asked to confirm the news by Decrypt.

Money has been flowing into the industry at a blistering pace. A buzzy Certuity report from last summer estimated that prediction markets could reach $95.5 billion by 2035, with a compound annual growth rate of 46.8%.

Kalshi was founded and launched in June 2021, but the company was stymied by an attempt by the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission to block its election contracts in September 2023.

The prediction markets startup took the matter to court and got a favorable district court ruling in September 2024, but the CFTC appealed, leaving Kalshi waiting to see if the ruling would hold. The regulator voluntarily dismissed its appeal in May 2025, effectively giving Kalshi the green light to offer election contracts.

Since then, its fundraising trajectory has accelerated sharply over the past year. In June 2025, the company raised $185 million at a $2 billion valuation in a Series C round led by Paradigm, with participation from Sequoia, Multicoin, and others—catapulting it to unicorn status.

By October, Kalshi had raised an additional $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, and others participating, as the company announced plans to expand into more than 140 countries. The jump up to an $11 billion valuation was announced in December, thanks to an additional $1 billion investment.

Its competitor, Polymarket, saw its own valuation reach $9 billion in October 2025 as Intercontinental Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company, completed a $2 billion investment. The news came alongside Polymarket CEO Shane Coplan being dubbed the youngest “self-made billionaire” according to a Bloomberg report at the time.

Decrypt reporter André Beganski contributed to this report.

The White House on Friday released a sweeping national policy framework for artificial intelligence, outlining recommendations to Congress that would set national standards for AI while relying on existing federal agencies—rather than creating a new regulator.

The proposal comes as states move ahead with their own AI laws, which the Trump administration has criticized as a burdensome “patchwork” of requirements for companies.

“The Trump Administration is committed to winning the AI race to usher in a new era of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people,” the White House said in a statement. “Achieving these goals requires a commonsense national policy framework that both enables American industry to innovate and thrive and ensures that all Americans benefit from this technological revolution.”

The framework urges Congress to set national AI rules that address child safety, innovation, free speech, and intellectual property, while preempting state laws it views as burdensome. It also says those federal standards should not override states’ existing authority to enforce laws on issues like fraud, consumer protection, and child sexual abuse material.

While some praised the framework for urging Congress to pass federal regulations, advocacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation questioned the details.

“The framework proposes a few ideas that would be disastrous, such as barring states from enacting protections for their residents, imposing age-verification requirements on AI platforms and services, and creating a new federal publicity right,” EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry told Decrypt. “Given the high level of the framework, the devil will be in the details.”

The Center for Democracy and Technology said the proposal includes “some sound statements of principles,” but does not resolve competing priorities.

“Its usefulness to lawmakers is limited by its internal contradictions and failure to grapple with key tensions between various approaches to important topics like kids’ online safety,” CDT Vice President of Policy Samir Jain said in a statement shared with Decrypt.

Jain also said the framework contradicted the White House’s own position on government influence over AI platforms.

“It rightly says that the government should not coerce AI companies to ban or alter content based on ‘partisan or ideological agendas,’ yet the administration’s ‘woke AI’ executive order does exactly that,” he said.

The framework follows earlier efforts by the Trump administration to curb state-level AI regulation. In November, a draft executive order outlined steps to challenge state laws and restrict funding to those that enacted laws that were seen as contradictory to the order.

Despite the administration’s attempts to set a federal standard, states have continued to pass their own measures. In October, California enacted SB 243, which would require AI companion chatbots to identify themselves and restrict certain interactions with minors while imposing disclosure rules on large developers.

The White House’s framework also said parents should be given more control over how children interact with AI systems, and that Congress should enact better protections against abuse.

“The administration is calling on Congress to give parents tools to effectively do that, such as account controls to protect their children’s privacy and manage their device use,” the White House said. “The administration also believes that AI platforms likely to be accessed by minors should implement features to reduce potential sexual exploitation of children or encouragement of self-harm.”

The administration also said that while it views AI training on copyrighted material as lawful, it believes courts should decide the issue, adding that Congress “should not take any actions that would impact the judiciary’s resolution of whether training on copyrighted material constitutes fair use.”

The proposal also calls for a federal law to protect individuals from unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes, expanding on a bipartisan law signed by Trump last year that made non-consensual intimate images and deepfake porn a federal crime. The new framework, however, comes with exceptions for parody, satire, news reporting, and “other expressive works protected by the First Amendment.”

The plan ties AI policy to infrastructure and economic goals, including faster permitting for data centers and ensuring residential electricity costs do not rise as a result of AI infrastructure buildout under a proposed “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.” It also calls for expanded use of on-site and behind-the-meter power generation to support data center development and improve grid reliability, along with incentives to expand AI adoption and access to federal datasets.

Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen called the proposal “a national framework to protect Big Tech at the expense of everyday Americans.”

“It is an extraordinary payback to the Big Tech companies that have lined up to throw pocket change at Trump’s inauguration, and for his ballroom, and for the Melania movie, and to settle bad faith lawsuits and more,” co-president Robert Weissman said in a statement shared with Decrypt.

Weissman said the focus on preempting state laws could leave gaps in oversight, arguing that without new federal standards, limiting state action would reduce regulation. He pointed to ongoing state efforts addressing issues such as deepfakes, AI companions, and algorithmic decision-making.

“This is a disgraceful proposal that, happily, will be dead on arrival in Congress,” Weissman said. “It does, however, show yet again that Donald Trump aligns his interests with the biggest corporations and the billionaire class, not those of the American people.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to include comment from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Publicly traded AI and blockchain firm Eightco Holdings (ORBS) has upped its investment in leading artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, making an additional $40 million investment in the firm behind popular chatbot ChatGPT. 

The investment brings its total backing to $90 million in the firm led by co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, accounting for 30% of its entire treasury. 

“We believe our investment in OpenAI represents a transformative opportunity not only for ORBS, but for our shareholders,” said Eightco CEO Kevin O’Donnell in a statement. 

“Access to high-growth private companies has historically been limited to institutional investors, and we’re proud to offer retail investors meaningful exposure to one of the most important AI companies in the world,” he added. 

The investment comes one week after the firm announced a $125 million fundraising injection from Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies, Kraken parent company Payward, and Ark Invest, the investment firm of noted technology investor Cathie Wood.

Alongside its investment, Eightco also added BitMine Chairman Tom Lee to its board of directors. (Disclaimer: Lee is an angel investor in Myriad, the prediction market platform operated by Decrypt‘s parent company, Dastan.)

“This investment highlights our continued belief in the long-term impact of artificial intelligence and positions ORBS at the forefront of innovation as this technology reshapes industries globally,” said O’Donnell. 

Beyond its OpenAI investment, the firm manages holdings of 11,068 ETH valued at $23.6 million, as well as $76 million in cash and stablecoins. Its largest crypto position is in Worldcoin (WLD), the native token for the proof-of-humanity blockchain project co-founded by Altman. 

As of Friday, Eightco held 277,222,975 WLD tokens—almost 10% of the entire WLD circulating supply—valued around $89.2 million. 

Last year, the firm raised $250 million to create a digital asset treasury with a focus on Worldcoin. Upon that September news, shares in the firm skyrocketed as much as 5,000%, hitting a 52-week high of $83.12 according to data from Yahoo Finance. 

On the day, shares have dropped more than 4% to change hands at around $0.90—down nearly 93% in the last six months.

U.S. President Donald Trump is putting intense pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower its benchmark interest rate. But as his war in Iran presses toward its fourth week, Bank of America economists raised the prospect of a policy move on Friday that’s in the opposite direction.

Although the group still views cuts as more likely than hikes, it outlined conditions under which the U.S. central bank would likely determine that tighter monetary policy is appropriate, amid surging energy costs and no end in sight to the conflict rattling the Middle East.

The economists wrote in a note that the likelihood of a hike would increase if Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s tenure at the central bank’s helm runs longer than expected, the unemployment rate remains below 4.5%, and price pressures from higher energy costs spread to other parts of the economy.

The assessment came as Bitcoin changed hands below $70,000, according to CoinGecko. Earlier this week, the digital asset touched a 45-day high of $75,600, after dropping as low as $63,000 on the day that the U.S.-Israel war with Iran broke out.

So-called risk assets, including stocks and crypto, would likely face short-term pressure in the unlikely event that the Fed raises interest rates following a series of cuts last year, James Butterfill, head of research at crypto asset manager CoinShares, told Decrypt.

Since Powell said on Wednesday that it was “too soon to know” how the war would affect the economy, Butterfill noted that exchange-traded funds tied to crypto have posted consecutive days of outflows, a potential preview of what a rate hike could bring.

“The initial reaction to Bitcoin would not be great,” he said. “But I think it would actually turn around and do quite well as people realize we could easily be in a stagflation environment.”

In some ways, a combination of high inflation, stagnant economic growth, and high unemployment would mirror the currency debasement and financial security concerns that led BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to highlight crypto and gold as “assets of fear” in October.

The sentiment was echoed by Gerry O’Shea, head of global markets insights at crypto asset manager Hashdex, who argued that macroeconomic headwinds for Bitcoin are unlikely to slow the pace of its adoption among institutional investors allocating on behalf of clients.

“You have a lot of investment advisors who have been doing their due diligence,” he said. “Given their mandate, they’re seeing this as an opportunity to get their clients exposure.”

‘Uncomfortably high’

On Friday, West Texas Intermediate oil edged down to $109 per barrel, Trading Economics data showed. Since the conflict in Iran upended global energy markets, via restrictions on key corridors like the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. benchmark has jumped as high as $116 per barrel.

Bank of America economists wrote that rate hike conditions would most likely be met “if the Iran shock is sustained but moderate,” describing $80 to $100 per barrel as a “sweet spot.”

On Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt parent company DASTAN, traders foresaw a 67% chance on Friday that Brent crude, the international benchmark, would pump to $120 per barrel before dumping to $55 per barrel. What’s more, they penciled in an 11% chance of the U.S. reaching a ceasefire with Iran by the end of this month.

The bank’s economists are among those still forecasting two 25-basis-point cuts this year, yet traders are currently holding their breath until mid-2027, per CME FedWatch.

“We are still a long way off from Fed rate hikes,” Zach Pandl, head of research at crypto asset manager Grayscale, told Decrypt. “Unless the increase in oil prices starts to feed into longer-term inflation expectations, Fed officials will likely consider it transitory.”

Indeed, the Fed’s framework typically “looks through” volatile food and energy costs, while focusing on so-called core goods and services. Bank of America economists noted that input costs for these sectors could rise as a result of higher energy prices, but they also raised the prospect of a broader supply disruption, with shipping costs for fertilizer and aluminum also surging.

They added that “core inflation is already uncomfortably high,” with the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge showing a 2.8% increase in January compared to a year earlier. That measure has run above the Fed’s 2% target for nearly five years.

Bitcoin has tumbled far from its all-time highs of $126,000 last year, leading Pandl to attribute the digital asset’s recent outperformance compared to gold and stocks to recovering sentiment and broader industry trends. 

“Bitcoin has traded remarkably well since the start of the war with Iran,” he said. “We think this reflects oversold conditions and continued positive fundamental news related to stablecoins and tokenization.”

Powell’s term as chair is slated to end in May. But on Wednesday, he indicated that he would continue to serve in his current capacity until his successor, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, is confirmed by the U.S. Senate. 

Bank of America economists noted that Powell “isn’t nearly as dovish” as Warsh is likely to be, bolstering the possibility of a hike. “This is important because we view June as the earliest meeting at which the Fed can start to hike rates,” they added.

Crypto exchange Gemini is facing a class action lawsuit from shareholders who claim the company illegally failed to disclose its pivot into prediction markets—and overstated the viability of its struggling core business.

The federal suit, filed this week in the Southern District of New York, alleges Gemini and its founders, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, materially misled investors in the build-up to taking the company public last fall.

Gemini “overstated the viability of its core business as a crypto platform” and “overstated its commitment to and/or the viability of growing its business through expanding its international operations,” the lawsuit claims.

The shareholders further argue that Gemini withheld information that would have shown the company was poised for “an expensive and disruptive restructuring.” Indeed, in February, the exchange laid off over a quarter of its staff and fully exited Europe and Australia, saying that it planned to lean on AI to boost company efficiency.

That same day, the Winklevoss twins announced the company planned to make its new prediction market platform “front-and-center” for users. Plans for this significant pivot were also improperly concealed when Gemini went public months prior in September, the shareholders allege.

Gemini did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on the case.

Since Gemini went public six months ago, the company’s stock (Nasdaq: GEMI) has lost nearly 85% of its value. In the same period, Bitcoin has shed some 40% of its price. Gemini shareholders insist the damage to Gemini’s stock has much to do with the company’s alleged failure to disclose the state of its businesses and its future plans.

“As a result of defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the company’s securities, Plaintiff and other class members have suffered significant losses and damages,” the complaint reads.

On Thursday, Gemini shares rose nearly 7% in after-hours trading after the company reported more stable revenue streams in 2025, and signaled success from its cost-cutting efforts—though it also reported a $582.8 million net loss for 2025.

Gemini’s stock is down 5.8% on the day Friday, as of this writing, to $5.66.

Investment banking giant Morgan Stanley has updated its Bitcoin ETF application, adding Fidelity as a custodian and disclosing that the fund will be listed on the NYSE Arca under the MSBT ticker when it launches.

The Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust will offer investors a fee waiver on the first $5 billion invested for six months, the firm said Wednesday in an amendment to its S-1 SEC form.

The firm first registered its Bitcoin fund alongside a Morgan Stanley Solana Trust in January. Based on SEC filings, it appears that the BTC fund could get listed before its SOL counterpart. The Solana filing hasn’t been updated since its initial S-1 was filed.

At the time, the bank described both as passive investment vehicles that would seek to track the performance of the relevant cryptocurrency’s price. The initial filings did not yet name custodians, crypto counterparties, or specify fee structures—which is typical for S-1 filings, which are usually amended leading up to a fund’s listing.

Earlier this month, Morgan Stanley said that The Bank of New York Mellon and Coinbase Custody Trust Company would custody the fund’s assets, with Fidelity now joining the list of custodians.

The updated application comes as Morgan Stanley has been signaling a broader crypto push.

In February, the bank’s newly appointed digital assets strategy head, Amy Oldenburg, said the firm plans to build proprietary Bitcoin custody and trading services in-house, with yield and lending services also under exploration.

“We really need to build this out internally. We can’t just primarily rent the technology to do this,” she said at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.

Morgan Stanley, which oversees nearly $9 trillion in client assets, confirmed last September that it would offer Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana trading via its E*Trade app.

The bank also filed to add an Ethereum ETF to its planned crypto lineup in January, one day after the Bitcoin and Solana registrations. That filing has also yet to be updated since it was first filed.

Your phone takes an hour to charge. Your EV takes all night. That trade-off—more capacity means more waiting—is so embedded in how batteries work that nobody really questions it anymore. A team of Australian scientists just built something that breaks that rule entirely.

Researchers at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, together with teams from RMIT University and the University of Melbourne, have unveiled the world’s first working quantum battery prototype.

This is an actual physical device that charges, stores energy, and discharges it—using the rules of quantum physics instead of chemistry. Their findings were published Wednesday in Nature Light: Science & Applications.

The prototype is a tiny, layered wafer of organic materials like a nanoscopic sandwich that gets charged wirelessly by a laser pulse. That pulse lasts femtoseconds. One femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second. The device charges in that window, then holds its energy for nanoseconds—about six orders of magnitude longer than it took to fill up.

That gap sounds unimpressive until you scale it. “If we can charge a battery in one minute, it would stay charged for a couple of years,” lead researcher James Quach explained. The physics already work. The challenge now is extending how long the stored energy can last in a real-world device.

The genuinely strange part isn’t the speed but the scaling behavior.

Conventional batteries get slower to charge as they grow. More capacity means more time, but quantum batteries do the opposite. The more molecules packed into the device, the faster each one charges—because at the quantum level, they don’t act individually. They behave collectively, sharing the incoming energy in a single coordinated burst the researchers call “superabsorption.”

Technically speaking researchers say that the charging time drops as 1/√N, where N is the number of molecules. Double the battery, cut the charging time by nearly half, and so on.

“Our findings confirm a fundamental quantum effect that’s completely counterintuitive: quantum batteries charge faster as they get larger,” Quach told Melbourne University. “Today’s batteries don’t function like that.”

This property had been predicted mathematically since 2013, and a partial version was demonstrated in 2022. What’s new here is the complete cycle: The team figured out how to pull the stored energy back out as an electrical current, which no previous quantum battery experiment had managed. The device also runs at room temperature—a practical advantage over competing superconducting approaches from China and Spain that require cryogenic cooling.

The immediate application isn’t your EV or something like that. The prototype’s total capacity is measured in billionths of electron-volts—enough to power nothing in the real world yet. But quantum computers are a different story. Those systems are already advancing faster than most expected, and they have a specific energy problem: Their delicate quantum states demand power delivered coherently, without the noise that conventional electronics introduce. A quantum battery charges and discharges using the same quantum language those processors speak.

“Quantum batteries could provide energy coherently, with the minimum energy cost to the quantum computers,” Professor Andrew White, who leads the quantum technology lab at the University of Queensland and was not involved in the research, told The News Digital.

CSIRO is already seeking development partners, including EV manufacturers and deep-tech investors, to push the research forward. The theory had a decade head start on the hardware. The hardware just caught up.

Evernorth Holdings, a firm with intentions of becoming the largest publicly traded XRP treasury, expects to launch with at least 473 million XRP valued around $685 million, according to its S-4 registration statement filed with the SEC on Wednesday. 

The firm, which got a sizable XRP contribution from Ripple—the payments firm that’s built around the crypto asset—raised more than $1 billion to accumulate the token. 

“We believe global finance is entering a new era with digital assets playing a larger role in how capital is held, managed, and deployed,” said Evernorth founder and CEO Asheesh Birla, in a statement. Our focus is on combining public-market discipline with XRP blockchain-based financial infrastructure to help shape a more transparent, efficient, and connected global financial system.” 

Initially announced in October, the firm’s planned public listing will come via a business combination between Evernorth and Armada Acquisition Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that is sponsored by Arrington Capital and trades on the Nasdaq as XRPN. 

Its XRP holdings, worth around $324 million less than the $1 billion it raised, were acquired via a variety of agreements, the S-4 filing notes.

The biggest chunk, around 211 million XRP, is being contributed by the sponsor, Arrington Capital, pursuant to an advanced funding subscription agreement. Nearly 127 million XRP is expected to be contributed by Ripple upon the completion of the business combination, while around 84 million further XRP tokens were purchased at an average price of $2.53 using $214 million in advanced funding. 

The value from its purchased lot has now almost been cut in half, and is valued around $122 million as XRP recently changed hands at $1.45. 

Nevertheless, the firm notes that it believes the public company will provide “an attractive entry valuation” to investors seeking exposure to XRP. 

“The SPAC Board believes that [Evernorth] provides an attractive entry valuation (calculated as a multiple to NAV) to XRP,” the filing reads.

While its filing is still subject to SEC review, and the business completion subject to shareholder approval, the firm intends to actively manage its eventual XRP treasury. 

Its four key business pillars include accumulating XRP, actively managing the asset, earning yield by using it in decentralized finance (DeFi), and exploring international expansion opportunities with a beginning focus on Japan and South Korea.

“Our core strategy begins with our efforts to acquire, hold, and actively manage a treasury focused on XRP,” it wrote in the S-4. 

XRP is down around 0.4% in the last 24 hours, recently sitting 60% off its July all-time high of $3.65. Earlier this week, the token leapfrogged BNB to become the fourth most valuable crypto asset by market cap. 

A representative for Evernorth did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

BlackRock’s iShares Staked Ethereum Trust has reached $254 million worth of assets under management after launching a week ago. That means investors have bought $146 million worth of shares since the fund debuted, on top of more than $100 million seeded in the fund.

BlackRock launched the iShares Staked Ethereum Trust (ETHB) on Nasdaq on March 12, with the seed capital coming from BlackRock Financial Management, an affiliate of iShares. The new fund stakes between 70–95% of its ETH holdings and passes 82% of resulting rewards to investors through monthly payments, with the remaining 18% split among the trust, custodians, and staking service providers.

The fund’s validators include Figment, Galaxy Blockchain Infrastructure, and Attestant. ETHB charges a 0.25% sponsor fee, discounted to 0.12% for its first year on up to $2.5 billion in assets. It entered a market where Grayscale and REX-Osprey had already launched competing staked Ethereum products.

Ethereum did have a bullish rally above $2,300 earlier this week, but but has since fallen alongside Bitcoin and the rest of the market. At the time of writing, ETH was changing hands for $2,126 after having dropped 4% in the past day.

The Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF added staking in October 2025 and renamed the fund to reflect its new staking activity in January. The fund saw mixed results its first week as a staking ETF, seeing a net outflow of $32.5 million. But Grayscale had the misfortune of adding staking to its ETF the same week that a Bitcoin flash crash triggered a $19 billion leverage wipeout last October, dragging down the rest of the crypto market.

Meanwhile, the Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF was formed in April 2024, although it didn’t initially launch with staking. That wasn’t added until October 6, 2025, the same week the ETHE fund added staking.

The BlackRock offering is different from both the Grayscale ETH funds because it was conceived and launched with staking, rather than adding the feature later.