XRP News Today: Ether Drops 4% Amid SEC ETF Review, Market Uncertainty

Ether (ETH) has experienced a 4% drop in the past week, despite the broader cryptocurrency market capitalization gaining 1%. This decline raises questions about the likelihood of a rally to $4,000. The rejection of Ether from the $2,800 level on June 11 did not dampen the appetite for exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which accumulated $322 million in inflows over the following two weeks. This movement could reflect traders pricing in higher odds of upcoming changes that would improve the ETFs’ utility and accessibility.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is analyzing requests to allow “in-kind” creations and redemptions, in addition to evaluating whether those ETFs can offer native staking operations, validating transactions in exchange for ETH rewards. The SEC has an intermediary deadline in late August. The lack of demand for bullish ETH leveraged positions could signal reduced confidence, especially as other altcoins may soon gain their own ETFs, including Solana (SOL), Litecoin (LTC), Polkadot (DOT), and XRP (XRP).

Typically, bulls pay to maintain their leveraged positions, but the reverse occurs in bearish markets. The current -2% annualized rate is not extraordinary, but it shows weak conviction at the current $2,400 ETH price. More importantly, this represents a stark contrast from the 10% positive funding rate just two weeks prior. Traders should check ETH options metrics to exclude anomalies from perpetual contracts, which are more popular among retail traders because their pricing tends to closely follow spot markets, unlike monthly futures. If whales and market makers are increasingly concerned about a price correction, the delta skew options metric will rise above 5%.

The ETH options delta skew currently remains within the neutral -5% to 5% range, although it has improved from the -7% level observed two weeks earlier. Still, there are no signs of intense demand for hedging, suggesting that whatever reduced appetite exists for leveraged ETH futures is unlikely to be a signal of broad bearishness. Ether bulls believe Ethereum is better positioned to absorb potential inflows from institutional investors, including traditional finance firms. For Ether supporters, Ethereum’s competitive edge stems from its layer-2 “fully customizable modular architecture,” “access to the deepest liquidity,” and security. But even if those differences are real, ETH remains 50% below its all-time high, so traders will unlikely flip bullish in the near term.