Stephanie Douse 
As crypto market AUM data continue to decline despite the bad market, the forthcoming Merge has helped to drive up ETH products and trading activity.
The trading volumes for Grayscale’s most well-known Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) products, GBTC and GETH, respectively, both decreased by 24.4% and 23.2%, respectively, reflecting this.
According to a report by CryptoCompare, the shift in trade volumes was caused by the much-awaited Ethereum Merge:
“Indeed, even at a more granular level, no Bitcoin products covered in this report saw AUM or volume gains in the month of August. We could be seeing interest move away from Bitcoin in the short term, as Ethereum-based products hold the attention with the much-anticipated merge on the horizon.”
Assets under management (AUM) for GETH climbed by 2.36% to $6.81 billion in August.
This did better than Bitcoin-related items, which experienced a loss of 7.16% to $17.4 billion.
The data was presented in a recent report from CryptoCompare.
Grayscale’s GBTC product, which represents $13.4 billion of the $25.8 billion total value of digital assets under management (or 53.4% of the total), had a 6% monthly AUM decline, which was primarily responsible for the overall 4% decline in monthly AUM data for digital asset investment products.
According to the research, the category “Other,” which includes non-Bitcoin and ETH items, experienced the greatest inflows, with a 12.3% rise to $1.13 billion during the first three weeks.
Throughout the month of August, a number of reputable financial institutions introduced new cryptocurrency investment products despite the bear market.
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), Exchange Traded Certificates (ETC), Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs), and Trust products are examples of these products.
One of the most famous was BlackRock’s private Bitcoin Trust, which prompted the former CEO of Grayscale, Barry Silbert, to declare “here comes Wall Street.”
The biggest asset manager in the world introduced the Bitcoin Trust after partnering with Coinbase to provide institutional trading services to its customers.
Another financial institution to make a move this month was Charles Schwab. It introduced its own “Schwab Crypto Thematic ETF,” which offers exposure to a variety of mining and staking firms as well as many blockchain-based applications.
Along with a new Metaverse and nonfungible token (NFT) oriented ETF launched by financial services company SoFi, BetaShares introduced Australia’s first Metaverse-focused ETF on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).