Ether rallied to $3,820 late Saturday in U.S. trading, a 6.8% gain on the day and up 22% on the week, after BlackRock's new staked Ethereum ETF pulled $410 million in net inflows in just three days following its Wednesday launch. The product, ticker ETHA Plus, passes the entire 4.1% staking yield through to investors after a 0.30% management fee, making it the highest-yielding U.S. ETF backed by a digital asset.
The flows lifted total spot Ethereum ETF assets to $26.4 billion across nine issuers, narrowing the gap with the $112 billion held by spot Bitcoin ETFs. Fidelity's competing FETH staked share class begins trading Monday and Vanguard quietly filed amendments Friday for its first staked digital asset product, scheduled for an August launch.
Glamsterdam Upgrade Enters Final Test Window
The Ethereum Foundation confirmed Saturday that the Glamsterdam upgrade has cleared two of the three required public testnets and is on schedule for mainnet activation on June 1. The hard fork bundles EIP-7251 increased validator limits, EIP-7805 censorship resistance protections, and an upgraded data availability sampling layer that pushes Layer 2 throughput to 250,000 transactions per second across the rollup ecosystem.
Layer 2 tokens rallied in sympathy. Optimism's OP token gained 11.2% to $4.84, Arbitrum's ARB rose 9.7% to $1.92, and Base's debut governance token BASE crossed $1.40 for the first time since launch. Polygon's POL added 8.4% on confirmation that the AggLayer cross-chain settlement product would reach 18 chains by the end of the second quarter.
Wall Street's New Yield Frontier
For traditional asset managers, the staked ETH ETF marks a turning point. The 4.1% yield exceeds the 3.42% currently offered by two-year Treasuries, and Goldman Sachs estimated in a Friday note that allocator demand could push staked Ethereum AUM toward $40 billion within 18 months as pension and endowment portfolios begin treating the product as a quasi-fixed-income instrument.