Ether futures OI rises to $25.4B as ETFs and Bitmine buy

Ether traded above $2,300 on Wednesday after falling to $1,940 on March 29. Aggregate futures open interest reached $25.4 billion, reflecting increased use of leveraged positions. Ether has not reclaimed the $2,400 level after roughly 10 weeks of attempts.

Perpetual futures funding rates fell below zero multiple times this week and have not held above 5% since Friday. A typical neutral annualized funding rate ranges between 5% and 10%. Negative funding rates indicate greater demand for short leveraged positions than for long leveraged positions.

US-listed Ether spot exchange-traded funds recorded about $248 million in net inflows over the past 10 days. Combined assets under management for those ETFs stood at $13.7 billion on Wednesday, down from $20.5 billion three months earlier. Separately, Bitmine Immersion purchased $312 million of ETH and now holds about 4.87 million ETH, equivalent to roughly $11.46 billion at current prices; those holdings are trading about 13% below the company’s acquisition cost.

Weekly revenue generated by decentralized applications on the Ethereum network fell to about $11 million, down from roughly $24 million in early February. Declines affected memecoin launch platforms, synthetic derivatives trading, collateralized lending, digital collectibles, decentralized exchanges and cross-chain bridges. Prediction markets and tokenized real-world-asset activity expanded but did not offset the overall drop in on-chain usage.

The S&P 500 reached a new high on Wednesday. Market participants hold ETH with the expectation that higher on-chain processing demand will increase fee burns and could reduce circulating supply over time. Recent spot ETF inflows and large institutional purchases occurred alongside recurring negative derivatives readings and weaker DApp revenue.