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Ethereum, the leading smart contract layer-1 blockchain, has gained 3.2% in the past 24 hours. ETH touched its intraday high of $3,514 earlier today and is currently trading for $3,488. Derivative traders getting liquidated appears to be the key factor for this upswing in the Ethereum price.
A total of $20.4 million worth of ETH shorts were liquidated in the past 24 hours, which far outweighs the $1.87 million worth of ETH longs were liquidated during the same period, according to derivatives analytics platform Coinglass.
A short is a derivative contract that traders use to be against the price of an asset going up. And a long is what traders use to be that an underlying asset’s price will increase.
Another key event that the market participants are closely watching is the approval of U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has asked spot Ethereum ETF issuers to submit revised filings by July 8, according to Eric Balchunas, Senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg.
This implies that spot Ethereum ETFs are likely to start trading sometime during mid-July. Initially, analysts estimated that Ethereum spot ETFs would get approved by July 2—but that now seems very unlikely.
SEC Chair Gary Gensler had previously stated that spot Ethereum ETFs would get approved sometime during summer. At the Bloomberg Invest Summit, Gensler stated that the process of approval is going smoothly.
In a bid to attract institutional investors, some ETF issuers—like VanEck and Franklin Templeton—have already announced fee waivers for their spot Ethereum funds.
ETH is not the only asset to have witnessed an uptick in its price. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization has increased 3.6% in the past 24 hours and is nearing the $2.5 trillion mark, according to CoinGecko.
This is likely due to $81 million worth of shorts getting liquidated across all assets in the past 24 hours. That’s offset by only $17 million worth of longs being liquidated during the same period.
LayerZero and Ethereum Name Service were the top gainers in the top 100 coins by market cap, as they registered gains of 27% and 24%, respectively. On the flip side, Kaspa was the only coin trading at a loss of more than 1%. Kaspa saw a downtick of 4% in the past 24 hours.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.