BlackRock's Ethereum ETF Loses $202 Million as Outflow Streak Hits Six Days, While Its Bitcoin Fund Keeps Pulling Cash In

US spot Ethereum ETFs recorded $201.89 million in net outflows on Tuesday, Oct. 6, according to SoSoValue data cited by Coingabbar and confirmed separately by KuCoin and Bloomingbit. Every dollar of that came from a single fund: BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust, ticker ETHA.

It was the sixth consecutive trading day of net withdrawals from the Ethereum ETF category. Trader T data, reported by Bloomingbit, put the five-day cumulative outflow at $405 million, the largest such stretch since Feb. 5.

Etha alone has pulled in roughly $13.036 billion in cumulative net inflows since the fund launched, according to KuCoin and Crypto Briefing. The entire Ethereum ETF sector's cumulative net inflow since its July 2024 launch stands at $13.549 billion. BlackRock's fund accounts for more than 96% of all the money that has ever gone into these products.

Total assets across the 10 spot Ethereum ETFs tracked by DefiLlama sit at $17.356 billion, equal to 5.27% of Ethereum's total market capitalization. ETHA alone holds about $9.8 billion of that, or 56% of the category, per DefiRate.

Bitcoin ETFs Moved the Other Way

While Ethereum funds bled, Bitcoin ETFs took in $118.86 million the same day, their third straight daily inflow in October, according to SoSoValue data reported by Coingabbar. BlackRock's IBIT led with $122 million and Morgan Stanley added $7.84 million. Bitcoin ETFs now hold $110.68 billion in total net assets, about 6.43% of Bitcoin's market cap, with $57.82 billion in cumulative net inflows since launch.

The divergence isn't new. BigGo Finance reported that for the week of Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, Bitcoin ETFs drew just $82.9 million, a sharp slowdown from $2.39 billion the prior week, while Ethereum funds lost $118 million, ending a seven-day inflow streak that had brought in $850.6 million. Fidelity's FETH accounted for $74.1 million of that week's Ethereum outflow, while Fidelity's FBTC shed $167.9 million on the Bitcoin side even as BlackRock's IBIT led inflows.

This isn't the first time ETHA has seen a big single-day exit. Crypto Briefing noted the fund saw about $110 million in redemptions on Sept. 16, a day that coincided with broader Ethereum ETF outflows of $224 million and came against the backdrop of a recent Federal Reserve rate move. Tuesday's $202 million redemption is nearly double that.

Price Action and What's Driving It

Ethereum's spot price fell as much as 3.13% to roughly $2,611–$2,616 on Oct. 6-7, according to TradingKey and Coingabbar, while Bitcoin slipped 1.7% to about $84,162. The broader crypto market cap, per CoinGecko data cited by Coingabbar, fell 1.8% to $2.96 trillion.

TradingKey attributed the Ethereum selloff to three factors: sustained institutional ETF outflows removing buying support, firming US Treasury yields tightening the macro backdrop for risk assets, and a wave of leveraged long liquidations on perpetual futures exchanges that amplified the downside. Those are TradingKey's stated drivers, not an independently verified causal chain, but they track with the ETF data.

Coingabbar also flagged that Arkham Intelligence tracked US government-linked wallets moving 833.6 BTC, worth about $71.6 million, to Coinbase Prime on Oct. 6, along with 40,285 BNB worth roughly $31.6 million shifted across addresses. Those wallets reportedly still hold close to $28 billion in crypto, including about 324,000 BTC. Large government wallet movements tend to spook traders, though Bitcoin ETFs still posted net inflows that same day, which cuts against reading the transfer as the dominant factor.

The Fair Counter-Read

Crypto Briefing framed the split flows as evidence that "investors are rearranging their crypto bets rather than leaving the room," pointing to simultaneous Bitcoin inflows as proof this is rotation, not retreat. Because ETHA represents the overwhelming majority of sector flows, a single large institutional client rebalancing can make the entire Ethereum ETF category look like it's in retreat, even if no other fund moved at all. DefiRate's flow data shows exactly that pattern: 10 straight days without a clean net-inflow day for the sector as of Oct. 6, while BlackRock's own Bitcoin fund kept adding money. Six days of ETF outflows concentrated in one fund, against a backdrop of $13.5 billion in lifetime inflows, is a correction inside a much larger bull case, not evidence of a collapse in institutional appetite for Ethereum.

The question is whether Friday's incomplete weekly figures, which BigGo Finance noted were still missing BlackRock entries as of Oct. 3, will show this rotation stabilizing or accelerating once full data posts. Ethereum's staking-enabled BlackRock product, ETHB, has also faced outflows in recent weeks, according to Crypto Briefing, adding a second data point worth watching alongside ETHA's next moves.