Crypto Millionaire Loses $43 Million on ETH
Crypto Millionaire Loses $43 Million on ETH Bet
Fickel still owes $103 million on Aave
Since the beginning of 2024, Fickel has borrowed $172 million in Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and converted them into Ethereum, hoping that the price of ETH will increase more than BTC. However, life is not as dreamy as ETH's price has been heavily outperformed by BTC, leading to a loss of more than $43.7 million. After that, Fickel had to spend another $12 million to buy a portion of WBTC to reduce his debt on Aave.
Ethereum has also underperformed Bitcoin for most of this year. ETH is currently at $2,279, down more than 5% over the past 24 hours.
ETH/BTC is also down 25% year-to-date and 9% over the past month. Taking data from Binance, ETH/BTC has dropped below 0.04, hitting its lowest since April 20, 2021, temporarily recorded at 0.03899. The historical peak of this rate was 0.1238 in January 2018 and the record low of 0.01615 fell in September 2019.
James Fickel is famous for investing $400,000 in ETH when its price was only $0.8 per coin.
According to Arkham Intelligence, Fickel's labeled wallet addresses are holding $350 million in assets. AETHWSTETH accounts for 99.9%, the rest are other coins such as ETH, USDC, OP with a value of only tens of thousands of dollars.
Ethereum ETFs continue to be "withdrawn"
Another factor pushing ETH prices down is the continuous outflow of money from Ethereum ETFs. Since their launch on July 23, ETH ETFs have been "drained" a total of $581 million. In particular, Grayscale's ETF accounts for more than $2.7 billion in outflows, according to data from Farside Investors.
This is in stark contrast to investors' expectations when they predicted that ETH prices would increase sharply thanks to the appearance of ETFs. Meanwhile, Bitcoin ETFs attracted 75% of new investment when Bitcoin price surpassed the $50,000 mark in February.
