The Daily: ETH ETF outflows, MARA's big BTC purchase, Monad ecosystem funding heats up and more

• Fidelity's FETH led Wednesday's figures with net inflows of $74.5 million, followed by the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust (ETH)'s $45.9 million, Bitwise ETHW's $29.6 million and VanEck ETHV's $19.8 million.
• BlackRock's ETHA experienced $17.4 million in net inflows, compared to $266.5 million on day one, while Franklin Templeton's EZET and Invesco's QETH added $3.9 million and $2.5 million, respectively.
• 21Shares' CETH registered zero flows for the day.
• Grayscale's converted and higher-fee ETHE fund was the only ETF to see net outflows, totaling $326.9 million. However, that was more than enough to overpower net inflows into the other funds.
• The spot Ethereum ETFs generated around $950 million in combined trading volume on their second day, down from $1.05 billion on Tuesday.
• Meanwhile, the 11 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $44.5 million in total net inflows on Wednesday.

MARA purchases $100 million worth of bitcoin, holdings surpass 20,000 BTC

• MARA did not provide specific details on when the purchases were made and at what average price, with the firm simply taking "strategic advantage of favorable market conditions to opportunistically purchase bitcoin in the market,” MARA CFO Salman Khan told The Block.
• However, based on the dollar amount and the company’s balance sheet holdings of 18,536 BTC as of the end of June, according to Bitcoin Treasuries, the latest acquisitions are likely to have totaled around 1,500 BTC, bought in the $54,000 to $68,000 range this month.
• Additionally, MARA said it would adopt a full "HODL" approach to its bitcoin treasury policy, retaining all its bitcoin mined with further strategic acquisitions made periodically, leveraging existing cash on its balance sheet and capital markets to fund operations going forward.

Monad ecosystem funding heats up

• Kintsu, a liquid staking protocol building on Monad,  raised $4 million  in a seed funding round led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Brevan Howard Digital, among others.
• aPriori, another liquid staking platform on Monad,  raised $8 million  in seed funding led by Pantera Capital at a $100 million token valuation.
• Additionally, the Monad-based on-chain orderbook exchange Kuru announced the close of a  $2 million seed funding round  led by Electric Capital.
• Monad is currently in the devnet phase, hitting 10,000 TPS during internal testing in March. Its public testnet is expected to follow shortly, with a mainnet release anticipated later in the year.

TON blockchain gasless transactions go live

• The W5 smart wallet upgrade, originally developed by Tonkeeper and subsequently approved as a standard by the TON Core team, means users are no longer required to hold toncoin to facilitate payments and can make transactions using USDT and Notcoin.
• The new standard also supports advanced parallel processing, allowing up to 255 simultaneous transactions and opening up new use cases.
• The move aims to simplify user onboarding and tap into more of Telegram's 950 million users, with its popular mini-app games like Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, Yescoin and Catizen using TON to facilitate transactions.

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest sells $7.8 million of its own spot Bitcoin ETF

• The sale from its Next Generation Internet fund (ARKW) marks the first time Ark Invest has sold shares in ARKB since the spot Bitcoin ETF launched in January.
• Ark's investment strategy aims to let no individual holding take up more than 10% of a fund's portfolio. ARKB is currently the largest holding in ARKW, comprising 10.98% of the fund at a market value of $162.5 million.

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