It was quite a roller-coaster of a week for the crypto markets, with volatility kicking off right at the start during Monday’s trading hours. Bitcoin surpassed the $70,000 mark for the first time since early April, achieving an intra-day high of almost $72,000.

This price rise was largely due to news regarding the SEC’s ethereum ETF decision, where several key industry analysts increased the likelihood of an ethereum ETF approval from 25% to 75%. This shift followed comments from the SEC asking Nasdaq, CBOE, and NYSE to refine their applications for listing these ethereum ETFs, suggesting that approval might be imminent.

This unexpected move boosted investor confidence across the crypto market, as the industry had anticipated a likely rejection.

Ether’s price jumped significantly, rising by close to 20% on the day, and the optimism spilled over to bitcoin, which rose by nearly 8% to close Monday’s trading session at $71,500.

However, prices slumped for the next three days until the SEC ultimately approved the ethereum ETF, giving slight gains to both BTC and ETH during Friday’s trading session. For the week, bitcoin ended up gaining 3.13%, closing at $69,090 on the CME Futures exchange.

This weekly closing price is just $2,500 short of the previous all-time highest weekly closing price of $71,500, dating back to late March.

Monday also saw the most leveraged short liquidations since early March, with over a quarter billion of futures short positions being liquidated across all major exchanges following news of the ETF approval odds.

Influx of Spot ETF Flows

Bitcoin spot ETF flows saw five consecutive days of inflows this week, a streak not seen since mid-March. The largest amount of inflows occurred on Tuesday, with over $305 million of institutional investments flooding in, the majority of which came from BlackRock’s IBIT fund, which took in a whopping $290 million in a single day.

The only fund to see outflows was Grayscale’s GBTC, with outflows totaling over $30 million between Wednesday and Thursday. By the end of the week, total aggregate inflows stood at $59 billion, just $2 billion shy of the $61 billion peak seen in mid-March. Total inflows are now up more than $12 billion since the slump at the end of April, representing a significant 25% increase from the $47 billion figure seen the previous month.

Bitcoin Balance On Exchanges

Bitcoin exchange balance dipped to a new all-time low this week, dropping from $1.75 million to $1.72 million , almost a 2% decrease. Typically, when bitcoin exchange balance drops, this implies bullish price action for bitcoin, as when market participants move their bitcoin off exchanges, they are more likely to hold it for the long-term, decreasing the amount of sell-pressure in current market conditions.

Exchange balance has been in a downtrend since the beginning of the year, and if it continues, this would be bullish for bitcoin’s future price direction.

Bitcoin Futures Open Interest Makes A Comeback

One of the key metrics we’ve been analyzing in this newsletter is bitcoin open interest data on leveraged exchanges, which measures the amount of open positions across all leveraged futures exchanges.

As of Friday, May 24, there were close to $33 billion in open positions, up from last month’s slump where open interest dipped as low as $27 billion, marking a 22% increase since last month’s low. Typically, while we cannot draw definitive conclusions from open interest data alone, an increase in open interest alongside a rise in the price of the underlying asset is a bullish indicator that suggests the predominant trend will continue.

With bitcoin up over 60% midway through the year, current technical and on-chain data suggest the bullish trend is likely to persist for the next few months.