Etiket arşivi: Crypto

Cardano’s ADA Leaps to 2.5-Year High of 90 Cents as Whale Holdings Exceed $12B

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As bitcoin (BTC) gets closer to the $100,000 mark for the first time — it crossed $99,000 earlier Friday — capital is rotating into alternative cryptocurrencies, creating a buzz in the broader crypto market.

Amid the excitement, proof-of-stake smart-contract blockchain Cardano’s native cryptocurrency ada (ADA) is having its moment. The token has surged 10% in the past 24 hours, trading at 90 cents early Friday on Coinbase and other exchanges. That’s the highest price since May 2022, according to CoinDesk Indices data.

The price has risen 22% this week, taking the month-to-date gain to 152%. That has raised the token’s market capitalization to $30.85 billion, making it the world’s 10th-largest digital asset. In contrast, the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), a measure of the broader crypto market, has advanced 14% this week and 58% this month.

ADA’s rally is accompanied by continued accumulation from whales, hefty crypto addresses with more than $10 million in the token. According to Tagus Capital, whales now hold over $12 billion in ADA.

On-chain activity confirms the involvement of whales and institutions, indicating that this rally could have staying power. Data from analytics firm IntoTheBlock shows the number of large transactions involving ADA has skyrocketed by 300% in two weeks.

It’s a sign of “heightened interest from institutional investors,” Tagus Capital said in a daily newsletter, noting the spike in large transactions. “Some of this momentum is sentiment-driven, as previously noted, with Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson, hinting at potential collaborations with the Trump administration for crypto-friendly policies.”

Coinbase App Gets Left Behind as Memecoin Craze Drives Traders On-Chain

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It’s long been a cryptocurrency maxim that Coinbase’s (COIN) ranking in app store downloads signals how much retail traders are participating in a bull market. Well, the bull run’s here, and Coinbase isn’t climbing charts like it used to.

Instead, Phantom, a harder-to-use crypto wallet, has leapfrogged the better-known centralized exchange. At press time, Phantom was in seventh place among free applications — between Temu and Google — on Apple’s U.S. App Store, well ahead of Coinbase at 27th.

The flip is challenging expectations of what mainstream traders can tolerate during their first days in crypto. While the bitcoin community in particular has always emphasized “being your own bank,” other parts of the cryptoverse, like Coinbase, have bet on a more accessible experience.

Memecoin mania is blowing that up. Coinbase and other established exchanges don’t list the bottom-of-the-barrel, hours-old, exceptionally risky yet sometimes tremendously lucrative (if you don’t lose your shirt, as most do) joke tokens that new traders want to bet on. To get those, they gotta go on-chain with something like Phantom.

“Traditional centralized exchanges can’t keep up with all of the new on-chain paradigms fast enough,” said Phantom CEO Brandon Millman in an email.

Chill Guy, TikTok

In the past week, one memecoin in particular, Chill Guy, caught plenty of attention on TikTok and even more bids on-chain. Bolstered by a coordinated social media marketing campaign, CHILLGUY — whose mascot is, well, a chill-looking dog — soared in days from a market cap of basically nothing to as high as $500 million.

Buying CHILLGUY and other fresh memecoins requires a bit more effort than, say, buying bitcoin (BTC) on Coinbase. Traders must navigate decentralized exchanges and learn to futz with finicky order settings just to get the prices they want. It’s a clunky setup with a high learning curve compared to the exchanges.

Whether TikTok is primarily responsible for driving newcomers on-chain is an open question. The video app’s exceptionally niche crypto scene doesn’t have any truly standout videos racking up millions of views, as those de rigueur dance routines often do. More common are the oodles of low-viewership crypto bros crowing about their gazillionaire designs. A handful also teach their followers how to download Phantom.

Coinbase is onboarding memecoins, to be sure. In the past week, it greenlit FLOKI and PEPE, as well as WIF for German traders. Those tokens have been around a relatively long time and accrued market caps in the billions of dollars, making them more stable (relatively speaking) than, say, DIDDYOIL, a memecoin only accessible to traders who operate on-chain.

“Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world, and we know we can’t do it alone,” a spokesperson for Coinbase said. “We believe a rising tide raises all boats, and we are thrilled to see more people engaging on-chain and with crypto over the last few weeks.”

While the Coinbase exchange itself is only tiptoeing into the memecoin space, the company at large is attempting to foster — and capture — such activity with its layer-2 network, Base. Base’s memecoin scene isn’t at the level of Solana (SOL), but it still sees millions of dollars worth of volume each day.

“We’re focused on making on-chain faster (transactions anywhere across the globe in seconds), cheaper (with typical Base fees of less than 1 cent) and easier to use, so on-chain technology is accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world,” the spokesperson said.

“We’re looking forward to bringing a billion people on-chain.”

Bitcoin Going to $140K Says Trio of AIs Managing $30M Investment Fund

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There’s a $30 million fund that, for all intents and purposes, leaves all investment decisions to be made by artificial intelligence (AI).

The firm’s name: Intelligent Alpha. Its staff includes founder and CEO Doug Clinton, a few programmers and contractors, and a trio of AIs — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.

The AI triumvirate makes up the firm’s investment committee and so far, it’s doing a stellar job.

“Some of the AI’s best calls have been shorts,” Clinton told CoinDesk in an interview. “It was short on Boeing earlier this year, before that door blew off the 737 MAX [in January]. And AI was actually short on the stock for that reason — because it thought there would be quality issues with the plane.”

While the firm has focused on traditional finance so far and mostly kept away from crypto, Clinton said he started experimenting with bitcoin (BTC) specifically in the last five months. The objective: for AI to set useful targets to trade the world’s top cryptocurrency.

“In the bull case — which was a Trump win and a more favorable regulatory environment — AI saw that bitcoin could maybe go to $140,000,” Clinton said. “Maybe that’s the scenario we’re working toward right now.”

How it works

A lot of firms now use AI to enhance human processes, to help analysts process data and think in different ways. But Clinton’s method is to give responsibility to the AI trio, and stay out of its way as much as possible when it comes to investment decisions.

The process is relatively simple. If, for example, Intelligent Alpha is looking to build a large cap U.S. equity portfolio, the fund will curate a bunch of data about U.S. companies with large market capitalizations, like historical revenue and earning projections, and feed it to the AIs.

The next step is to give a philosophical framework for the AIs to use. Clinton asks the AIs to step into the shoes of some of the most famous investors in the world — Warren Buffett, Stanley Druckenmiller, Cathie Wood — and apply their way of thinking to the portfolio at hand.

The triumvirate then produces a portfolio, which a human must double-check to make sure there aren’t any “hallucinations,” in Clinton’s words. For example, the AI may accidentally include a stock that was recently acquired, or the stock of a company with a small market cap.

“Other than that, we try not to really mess with the portfolios,” Clinton told CoinDesk. “As a human, I’ll sometimes look at the portfolios and think ‘Oh, this pick seems like a terrible idea.’ Other times I’ll see something really interesting and try to understand the logic. It’s kind of fun.”

The process involves the three AIs explaining their reasoning to Clinton. Not only does it help him ascertain that the investments are aligned with the portfolio’s goals, but he says that models provide better portfolios when they’re forced to explain why they like specific stocks.

It often happens for the AIs to disagree. And their way of thinking changes as updates get rolled out. “It used to be the case that Claude was the most contrarian model in terms of the outputs, when we first started testing,” Clinton said. “Now I would say it’s ChatGPT.” And while Clinton has tested other AIs such as Grok or Lama AI, keeping the investment committee down to three AIs has proved to be the most efficient set-up.

Predicting the future

Investors can gain exposure to Intelligent Alpha’s strategy through an exchange-traded fund, the Intelligent Livermore ETF, which launched in September and uses AI to build a global equity portfolio. More such funds are on the way, Clinton said.

For the Livermore ETF, every financial quarter the models review world events and try to make predictions for the next three to six months. Five or six areas of opportunities are then identified (following the investment philosophies of the greats like Druckenmiller) and the portfolio gets built around these sectors.

Having competing philosophies means the portfolio usually ends up being quite balanced. “In many cases they’re looking at idiosyncratic opportunities,” Clinton said. “We haven’t seen big issues where [the investment philosophies] are at odds, but even then, it would be like hedging.” The AIs themselves make the decisions on how to weigh the various philosophies found in the portfolio, depending on the areas they’re the most confident in.

“AI has been, at least so far, really good at seeing forward,” Clinton said. “Right before we launched, it made a big bet on Asian stocks, specifically Chinese stocks, and that was right before [billionaire hedge fund manager] David Tepper went on CNBC in September and said that China was his biggest bet, that they were bringing out the bazooka for stimulus. And you know, Chinese stocks went crazy.”

Another memorable trade: chipmaker giant Nvidia has been AI’s top pick since the experiment began in summer of 2023. “Back then, I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Nvidia had run so much at that point,” Clinton said. “But it’s up now like 400% from the moment the AI picked it.” The lesson in there, he says, is humans will react to charts emotionally, whereas AI “just doesn’t care. It says ‘No, this is going to go higher.’”

Not that every bet has been a slam dunk, but so far, the mistakes have been on the margin, according to Clinton. The AI is building a good track record on macro events especially, he said. For one thing, it predicted that former President Donald Trump would be re-elected.

And crypto?

One of the reasons Intelligent Alpha doesn’t focus too much on crypto is simply lack of data. Their trades may have happened on-chain, but there’s no easy way to go back and find the kind of trading setups and investment philosophies used by famous crypto investors like Cobie or GCR. Most of the time, all you can do is go off of their posts on X — and it’s hard to know whether the posts reflect reality.

That being said, the crypto community’s reliance on X means that Grok could end up playing a role in Intelligent Alpha’s triumvirate someday for crypto purposes, Clinton mused, since that model is trained and fine-tuned with data from the social media platform.

“The question that we’re exploring here is, what can we do with AI that would maybe be unique and different and stand out a little bit,” Clinton said. “To find a unique way to use AI to identify breakout crypto projects, that would be a really cool way to use the tech.”

Trump Reportedly Plans to Name Pro-Crypto Hedge Fund Manager Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is close to naming hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, as his pick for Treasury Secretary, according to Bloomberg and other media outlets.

If the Senate confirms him, the next person whose signature adorns U.S. paper currency will be a fan of the digital currency ecosystem set up to replace the conventional financial system.

Bessent runs Key Square Group, a macro investing firm. He worked for prominent investor George Soros three decades ago and was, according to The Wall Street Journal, “one of the driving forces” behind Soros Fund Management’s famous bet — that netted a more than $1 billion profit — that the British pound would collapse.

Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto as a whole are now in his sights.

“I have been excited about [Trump’s] embrace of crypto and I think it fits very well with the Republican Party, the ethos of it. Crypto is about freedom and the crypto economy is here to stay,” he said in an interview with Fox Business in July. “Crypto is bringing in young people, people who have not participated in markets.”

Polymarket traders had bet that he was a frontrunner. At one point, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick was viewed as one, too, but he was ultimately picked as Commerce Secretary. Lutnick has also dabbled in digital assets, helping stablecoin issuer Tether manage the giant stockpile of U.S. Treasuries that back its USDT stablecoin since 2021.

Crypto.com Overtakes Coinbase to Dominate North American Crypto Trading, Data Shows

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Digital asset trading on Crypto.com has exploded this year, pushing the crypto exchange’s volumes in North America well ahead of Coinbase (COIN).

Crypto.com’s monthly spot trading volume soared to $134 billion in September from $34 billion in July, according to data from The Block. Overall trading volumes on North American crypto exchanges was $183 billion in September, in which Coinbase handled $46 billion.

Crypto.com first overtook Coinbase in July and continues to lead so far in October. So far this month, the exchange saw $112 billion trading volume out of the overall $173 billion traded on exchanges in the region, The Block data shows. Kraken, the third-largest exchange, way behind in October with just under $10 billion in trading activity.

A key reason for Crypto.com’s popularity could be the wide range of tokens on offer. It lists over 378, ranging from mainstays bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) to memecoins, such as book of meme (BOME), to ecosystem tokens such as Jupiter’s JUP and deBridge. Coinbase and Kraken, in contrast, are more selective, offering fewer than 290 tokens each.

BTC and ETH trading dominate Crypto.com, accounting for more than 85% of all trading activity across Tether’s USDT stablecoin and U.S. dollar pairs, CoinGecko data shows.

Some 26% of the exchange’s web traffic comes from the U.S., Kaiko Research said earlier this month, with most users active during U.S. trading hours.

A Citigroup report earlier this month partly attributed this dominance to the crypto ETFs that have been extremely successful in 2024.

Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck, said in an X post in September that Crypto.com’s “average BTC trade size on Crypto dot com has 3x YTD” coinciding with Cboe Global Markets, a U.S.-based exchange, closing its spot crypto division.

“Liquidity has kept pace with trade volumes, suggesting market makers are also more active on the platform,” Sigel said at the time.

Meanwhile, the bump in volumes comes amid ongoing legal drama for Crypto.com. Earlier this month, the exchange filed suit against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to “protect the future of the crypto industry in the U.S.,” shortly after it received a Wells notice from SEC staff.

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the firm brought the case to limit the SEC’s “unauthorized overreach and unlawful rulemaking,” as CoinDesk reported.

DeFi Cover Provider Nexus Mutual Backs New Crypto Insurance Broker Native

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Nexus Mutual, the decentralized alternative to traditional insurance geared towards risks involving digital assets, is widening its distribution capabilities by backing a dedicated crypto insurance broker called Native.

Native goes live with $2.6 million of seed funding led by Nexus Mutual, and the two firms are offering $20 million on-chain cover per risk, according to a press release on Tuesday. Nexus Mutual currently has a capital pool of about $200 million, mostly denominated in ETH, the token of the Ethereum blockchain, meaning the mutual will be able to write multiple coverage lines per risk from day one, Nexus Mutual said.

There has always been a dire shortage of insurance capacity within the crypto industry. At a rough estimate, about 1% of crypto assets are insured today, compared with the traditional world where a general rule of thumb is that about 7% of GDP is insured.

“Native’s role is to help solve this chronic under insurance problem,” said Native co-founder and CEO Ben Davies in an interview. “No industry can grow without a liquid insurance market and so we have built a commercial insurance broker on-chain, which is what the market has really been missing.”

The aim is to increase capacity by connecting businesses with Nexus’s capital pools, while giving clients the ability to pay in crypto, or be paid in crypto if there is a claim, said the broker’s other co-founder Dan Ross. In addition, Native will go beyond mere distribution by running a capital pool on Nexus, he said. It means the firm will also be involved in underwriting in the form of a managing general agent (MGA) positioned on top of Nexus Mutual.

Since starting out in 2019, Nexus Mutual has underwritten about $5 billion of crypto assets and paid out $18 million in claims. This has involving various risks associated with decentralized finance (DeFi), for instance, that conventional insurers might struggle to meet.

The protocol also allows its members to deploy assets into syndicates, in a way similar to how the Lloyd’s of London market operates, for which they receive NXM tokens, which can be used to back certain risks. Like being a Lloyd’s investor, or “Name,” there is a risk attached to this, but yields can reach around 25%, according to Nexus Mutual founder Hugh Karp.

“We understand crypto native risks better than anyone else and we’ve got a large amount of capacity that’s specifically looking to deploy into crypto risks and crypto businesses,” Karp said in an interview. “We aren’t like some big insurance company that’s trialing this out as a proof of concept for a few years and then it disappears.”

Base DeFi Pass

Nexus Mutual’s insurance alternative is also available to users of many of the main protocols on Coinbase’s layer 2 network, Base, via a product called Base DeFi Pass, created by crypto insurance startup OpenCover.

Base DeFi Pass covers a clutch of high profile protocols on Base including the likes of Uniswap, Compound and Morpho, and is designed to be a “set and forget” option where one set of cover is all that’s needed across a range of applications, according to OpenCover CEO Jeremiah Smith.

The type of risks covered include smart contract code bugs, exploits and hacks, while things like phishing attacks are excluded, as are losses related to market price movements of assets used or relied upon by the covered protocol.

“Base Pass is another innovation being catalyzed by Nexus Mutual,” Smith said in an interview. “You purchase one lot of cover and you’re covered on most of the leading protocols on Base, rather than having to come to Nexus and OpenCover each time and have to rebalance everything.”

In order to bring lots of people on-chain, Base needs to make those users feel confident about interacting with DeFi, said Base creator Jesse Pollak.

“OpenCover’s Base DeFi pass adds an extra safety net, so people can feel more secure and protected when they participate in the open DeFi ecosystem on Base,” Pollak said via email.

First Mover Americas: BTC Jumps Above $71K, DOGE Leads Market Surge

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This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter, putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.

Latest Prices

CoinDesk 20 Index: 2,144.30 +3.12%

Bitcoin (BTC): $71,248.64 +3.76%

Ether (ETH): $2,625.97 +3.89%

S&P 500: 5,823.52 +0.27%

Gold: $2,747.55 +0.17%

Nikkei 225: 38,903.68 +0.77%

Top Stories

Bitcoin rose to over $71,200 early European morning on Tuesday amid a significant uptick in trading activity. BTC broke through the $70,000 barrier for the first time since June on Monday, prompting $48 billion in trading volume and over $143 million in shorts being liquidated across the crypto market. Bitcoin is around 4% higher in the last 24 hours, while the broader digital asset market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index, is up by over 3.2%. DOGE led the gains, jumping over 14% to around $0.165, while ETH rose above $2,600 on the back of a 3.9% rise.

DOGE futures interest is nearing record levels, thanks to increasing confidence of Donald Trump winning next week’s presidential election. Traders view DOGE as an election play thanks to Elon Musk’s endorsement of the Republican candidate, and by extension the possibility of Musk running a “Department of Government Efficiency,” abbreviated as D.O.G.E. DOGE-denominated futures have risen 33% since Sunday to 8 billion tokens as of European morning hours Tuesday. “Elon is memeing the idea of a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ into reality and is able to tie it to DOGE somehow,” influential X account @theunipcs told CoinDesk. A Trump victory next week would bring “an even more parabolic move in dogecoin,” @theunipcs added.

Trading on Crypto.com has exploded this year, pushing the crypto exchange’s volumes in North America ahead of Coinbase. Crypto.com’s monthly spot trading volume soared to $134 billion in September from $34 billion in July, according to data from The Block. Overall trading volumes on North American crypto exchanges was $183 billion in September, in which Coinbase handled $46 billion. Kraken, the third-largest exchange, was way behind in October with just under $10 billion in trading activity. A key reason for its popularity could be the wide range of tokens on offer. Crypto.com lists over 378, compared to Coinbase and Kraken which offer fewer than 290 tokens each.

Chart of the Day

– Jamie Crawley

Crypto Ghosted in U.S. Treasury Department’s New Strategy on Financial Inclusion

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The U.S. Treasury Department has a new strategy for financial inclusion to help people get access to the financial system, but the 35-page report references cryptocurrency only once – to tout Treasury’s work on flagging the industry’s hazards.

While Vice President Kamala Harris has said on the campaign trail she’ll encourage crypto as a part of her economic agenda, the administration she’s currently working for is keeping digital assets at arm’s length in what may be the Treasury’s final mention of cryptocurrency before next week’s election.

The Biden administration’s Treasury Department noted in the Tuesday report that it “cultivates financial inclusion by developing and promoting research,” and — to that end — it had issued a report in 2022 on the “risks related to digital assets.”

“Access to safe, affordable financial products and unbiased information can help all Americans pursue financial security,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to say at a banking event in New York on Tuesday, according to her prepared remarks in which she’ll call for the bankers’ “active partnership” in the new strategy.

From its start, the crypto sector has made a case for itself as a low-barrier entree into finance. That’s been among the core selling points, for instance, from industry lobbyists as they explain digital assets to lawmakers and regulators. But while international remittances have been an obvious little-guy use case for crypto, Treasury doesn’t seem to have been moved by the industry’s inclusion arguments.

Liberal-leaning groups such as the Center for American Progress have argued that the claim from crypto advocates about its benefits for financial inclusion “does not hold up to scrutiny,” and the Brookings Institution also sought to debunk that narrative.

It’s unclear whether the vice president’s office would have had any say in the Treasury’s latest strategy, though it would seem to contrast with the crypto openness her campaign has been signaling. While Harris’ election opponent, former President Donald Trump, has made his recent crypto enthusiasm a prominent part of his 2024 campaign, his own administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission was the first to bring a major case that attacked the legal foundation of Ripple.

Coinbase Revenue May be Hurt by Lower Trading Volumes, Regulatory Uncertainty, Analysts Say

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Wall Street analysts expect a further slowdown in spot trading volume for Coinbase (COIN) in the third quarter, partly triggered by a lack of catalysts for crypto and an uncertain regulatory environment heading into the presidential election.

The crypto exchange, when it reports its earnings post-market on Wednesday, is expected to experience a revenue decline of about 13% in the third quarter, to $1.26 billion from $1.45 billion in the last quarter, according to estimates on FactSet. Meanwhile, the earnings per share (EPS) are forecasted to be $0.46, up from $0.14 in the second quarter.

“Volumes continued to soften through the quarter and we shake out quite a bit below the Street, largely on weaker retail transaction revenues,” Barclays analyst Benjamin Buddish wrote in a note. He has an equal weight rating on the stock and raised its price target to $175 from $169 while cutting the EPS estimate to $1.05 from $1.62 in the third quarter.

The third-quarter slowdown in trading volume is not just Coinbase-specific but an industry-wide phenomenon. Data from The Block shows that roughly $3.3 trillion was traded on all crypto exchanges, compared to $3.92 trillion in the second quarter. Coinbase competitor Robinhood (HOOD) is also set to report third quarter earnings after-market on Wednesday.

Additionally, the data revealed that crypto exchange Crypto.com has been the most popular trading venue for investors in the North American region since July when it first overtook Coinbase as the exchange with the highest trading volume. One of the reasons why Coinbase might have fallen short in volume is due to Crypto.com’s offering of a wider range of tokens.

Analysts also believe that regulatory uncertainty due to the upcoming presidential election results was one of the main drivers behind lower trading volumes on U.S. exchanges. According to Oppenheimer, the spot volume outside of North America increased 61% from the previous quarter. “We believe lack of catalysts and US election overhang have negatively impacted bitcoin,” Oppenheimer analyst Owen Lau wrote. “International volume was a bright spot.”

The investment bank estimates that third-quarter revenue will be $1.29 billion and EPS will be $0.40. It has an outperform rating on Coinbase and a price target of $282 over the next 12 to 18 months.

Lower staking revenue

In addition to lower revenue from trading fees, which continues to be Coinbase’s main stream of income, J.P. Morgan’s Kenneth Worthington expects lower revenue from the exchange’s staking services. This is largely driven by ether (ETH) underperforming in the third quarter, down roughly 24% from Q2, according to the bank.

Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has been trading in the rough range of $2,330 to $2760 since August, with the current price at $2624 as of press time. In the months from April to June, that range was much higher, at $3,503 to $3,368.

“Ether [has] particularly underperformed [during the quarter] despite seeing the launch of its spot ether ETPs intra-quarter,” Worthington wrote. “We see this market cap contraction particularly weighing on Coinbase’s staking revenue in 3Q and subscriptions and services revenue overall.”

Subscription and services revenue was one of the bright spots in the second quarter, growing 17% from Q1. The main catalysts for the uptick were higher average USDC on-platform balances and USDC market capitalization.

J.P. Morgan, which rates the stock neutral, raised its price target to $196 from $180. However, it sees EPS landing anywhere between $0.42 and $0.54 for the third quarter.

Shares of the exchange are up nearly 30% year-to-date, but they are currently 21% down from their peak of $279.71 in March. As of press time, the stock was trading at $221.97.

Nearly 50% of U.S. Investors Plan to Invest in Crypto ETFs: Charles Schwab Survey

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U.S. investors are very much keen on investing in exchange-traded funds (ETF) that hold cryptocurrencies, a new survey commissioned by financial services giant Charles Schwab showed on Thursday.

Some 45% of respondents said they plan to invest in crypto via ETFs over the next year, up from 38% a year earlier, surpassing demand for bonds and alternative assets. Only U.S. equities fared better, with 55% of participants planning to invest.

Among millennial ETF investors, though, crypto was the leading asset class, with 62% saying they plan to allocate to that sector versus only 48% for U.S. stocks, 47% for bonds and 46% for real assets such as commodities.

Boomer ETF investors were much less keen on digital assets, with only 15% of the respondents having plans to invest.

“Pretty stunning,” Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said about crypto’s high ranking in investment plans in the survey.

The implications of the survey, which asked 2,200 individual investors between the age of 25 and 75 with at least $25,000 to be invested, could be a boost for the nascent and growing class of crypto-focused ETFs, which are being marketed as a diversification tool for traditional investment portfolios of stocks and bonds.

While U.S.-listed spot bitcoin ETFs hardly need the help, having attracted nearly $19 billion of net inflows since their debut in January, spot ether ETFs have languished on a relative and absolute basis since their launch a few months later. Exits from the incumbent Grayscale Ethereum Trust have overwhelmed inflows into the newer entrants, with net outflows for the group as a whole topping more than $500 million, according to Farside Investors.