CoinDesk's weekly ‘Chart of the Week’ highlights topical digital asset developments with vital commentary and analysis.
In this week’s COTW we look at the performance of ETH and its beta plays since June 16th, 2025. Over this period, ETH has outperformed BTC by nearly 70%, but this strength has not carried through to an equal-weighted Meme Index (PEPE, SHIB, SPX, MOG) or DeFi Index (AAVE, MORPHO, LINK, CURVE, UNI), both of which have lagged meaningfully.
This divergence suggests that ETH’s rally has been driven primarily by institutional flows, such as ETF inflows and treasury allocations, which have concentrated demand in ETH itself rather than spilling over into the broader set of ETH-linked tokens.
This week’s Chart of the Week highlights May’s correlation of daily returns between BTC, ETH and the SP500, falling to 15.8% and 18.2%, respectively, the lowest level since August 2022.
Digital assets have benefitted from a significant price appreciation following signs that tight monetary policy and high interest rates may soon reach their peak. This comes after the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, causing a stir in the banking system, and amplifying the interest in digital assets.
The depegging of USDC and regulatory issues with BUSD has led to Binance converting $1 billion of their Industry Recovery Initiative funds to BTC, ETH, and BNB, triggering further buy pressure for digital assets.
In this week's Chart of the Week (COTW), we examine the relationship between ETH/BTC open interest (OI) and price ratios. A previous divergence—where the ETH/BTC OI ratio rose without a corresponding increase in the price ratio—appears to have resolved. The ETH/BTC OI ratio has now reached or approached all-time highs, while the ETH/BTC price ratio is simultaneously breaking out and trending upward.
This synchronized movement suggests that ETH's recent appreciation relative to BTC is likely driven by a surge in speculative and derivatives-based capital flows, signaling a shift in the market's underlying dynamics.
In this week’s COTW, we examine the growing divergence between BTC options and futures markets. Despite BTC options open interest (OI) reaching all-time highs in late July 2025, the options OI-to-futures OI ratio has been trending lower since its peak in Q1 2025. This suggests that while demand for BTC options remains strong, futures open interest is growing at an even faster pace — likely driven by renewed directional conviction and increased speculative positioning via futures.
The flattening ratio may also reflect a more balanced and mature derivatives market structure, with greater use of both instruments across institutional strategies.
In this week's COTW, we examine ETH's yearly returns since its inception, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Ethereum Genesis Block. The data shows ETH has delivered positive returns in 6 of its full years, with a simple average yearly return of 985%. Excluding the 2017 outlier, this simple average return is 155%.
In comparison, the S&P 500's average annualized return for the same period (2015 - July 2025) was approximately 12.74% while BTC's was around 54%. This highlights ETH's significant outperformance relative to both traditional benchmarks and other major cryptocurrencies over the past decade.
In this week's Chart of the Week, we analyze the weekly centralized exchange volumes for Coindesk 20 constituents. 13 out of the 20 constituents currently demonstrate a positive volume change in the past week, indicating significant activity and interest in the market.
Furthermore, when compared to Bitcoin's decline of volume, most non-BTC constituents are displaying stronger volume performance, implying a capital flow into a broad range of altcoins and signaling potential for broader altcoin strength relative to Bitcoin.
In this week’s Chart of the Week, we analyse Hyperliquid's performance, driven by the synergy between its native token and underlying platform activity. HYPE/USD reached an all time high af $48.9, a price trend that is backed by fundamentals as the platform's open interest concurrently reached all time highs at just under $12b.
This pickup in fundamentals was materially backed by launch of pump.fun's token on the platform, which currently accounts for 5% of total open interest on Hyperliquid.
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