Week of 30 August 2021: Ether gains 22.55% while Bitcoin adds 6.13%
When both assets rise in one week but one moves far more than the other, what does the price record show about whether the move was broad or relative, and what can it not explain?
BTC rose from 48,767.84 to 51,756.88 (+6.13%) and ETH from 3,223.47 to 3,950.29 (+22.55%), a gap of 16.42 percentage points. The ETH/BTC ratio rose 15.47%. ETH's return ranked at the 94th percentile of the 185 weeks recorded, BTC's at the 72nd.
What the data shows. Both assets rose, but not by the same measure. BTC opened at 48,767.84, fell to its weekly low of 46,512 at 01:00 UTC on Wednesday 1 September, then set its high of 51,900 at 22:00 UTC on Sunday 5 September and closed at 51,756.88, in the upper third of the week's range. ETH rose 22.55%, from 3,223.47 to 3,950.29, with its best day on 1 September (+11.60%) and its high of 4,027.88 on Friday 3 September. Both assets made their largest hourly move in the same hour, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday: +2.07% for BTC and +4.50% for ETH. The ETH/BTC ratio rose 15.47%.
What it does not show. Prices record how far and when, not why. Nothing here identifies who was buying ETH, or whether the gap between the two assets came from positioning, leverage, or something outside these markets. The data also stops at 23:59 UTC on Sunday, so it cannot say whether the closing levels held.
What a careful desk would check. A gap of 16.42 percentage points matters to any book that hedged ETH with BTC one-for-one: the hedge would have covered only part of the move. Realised volatility, the swings that actually happened scaled to a yearly figure, was 76.2% for ETH against 52.9% for BTC, and ETH's weekly range was 28.15% against 11.58%. Volume split as well: ETH traded 1.20 times its prior twelve-week average while BTC traded 0.89 times. The larger move came with heavier activity in the asset that moved further.
Funding. Funding, the regular payment between long and short holders of perpetual futures contracts, stayed positive all week. BTC averaged 0.0282% per eight hours with a high of 0.0574%, and ETH averaged 0.0381% with a high of 0.0807%. Longs paid shorts throughout, so leveraged holders on the winning side carried a running cost.
What would change this reading
- If a later week sends ETH more than 16.42 percentage points behind BTC, this week reads as a relative rotation rather than a settled shift.
- If BTC closes a later week below 46,512, the Sunday high of 51,900 looks like a local peak rather than a step up.
- If ETH funding rises above 0.0807% per eight hours while price stalls below 4,027.88, longs are paying more to hold a position that has stopped advancing.
- If BTC volume stays near 0.89 times its prior twelve-week average while price rises, the move is running on lighter activity than the weeks before it.
Terms
- hourly correlation
- how closely two prices moved together hour by hour, on a scale from -1 to 1
- realised volatility
- how much the price actually swung over a period, expressed as a yearly percentage
- perpetual funding
- a regular payment between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract that keeps its price close to the spot price