Crypto ETFs Are Surging, but Bitcoin Ether Aren’t the Big Winners
Sumit RoyWed, September 23, 2026 at 2:22 AM GMT+3 3 min read
Crypto ETFs have surged over the past week. Bitcoin neared $87,000 for the first time since January and has nearly erased its losses for the year after bottoming below $59,000 in June. Ether has staged a comeback of its own, climbing to around $2,800 from a low of $1,550 earlier this year.
There isn't an obvious catalyst behind the move. If anything, crypto faced a headwind recently when the CLARITY Act, which would have set up a regulatory framework for the industry, failed to advance in the Senate.
But that is more of a setback for the industry's ability to build than a driver of prices, and the market quickly shrugged it off and rallied in spite of it.
The likelier explanation for the recent jump is plain risk-on appetite. Stocks are at record highs, and after a long stretch of going nowhere, crypto looks cheap to some investors relative to its former highs.
That said, the comeback is far from complete. Most major crypto assets are still below their all-time highs and even below where they began the year.
The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) is down 1.3% year-to-date, while the iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA) is off 7%.
Measured from last year's all-time highs, the hole is much deeper. IBIT is down 31% and ETHA is lower by 43%.
The Ones That Are Winning
While nearly every U.S.-listed spot crypto ETF is still in the red for 2026, a few have posted solid returns.
One is the Grayscale Chainlink Trust ETF (GLNK), which is up 6.2% on the year. But the standout by a mile is the Grayscale Zcash ETF (ZCSH), up a remarkable 184%.
Zcash is a privacy coin, a cryptocurrency built to shield transaction details like the sender, receiver, and amount, which most blockchains, including Bitcoin, leave public.
Privacy coins have been one of the best-performing corners of crypto this year, and Zcash has led the pack. The rally has been driven by renewed interest in financial privacy as government surveillance concerns grow, and high-profile backing from crypto investors like Paradigm and Multicoin.
The launch of the ZCSH exchange-traded fund itself added to the momentum by giving investors a more accessible way to buy the coin. The fund had existed since 2017 as a closed-end trust, but it converted to an ETF in August, which opened it up to a broader pool of buyers.
ZCSH now holds $917 million in assets, with $273 million of that coming from inflows since the conversion about a month ago. The rest is price appreciation plus the closing of the fund's discount to its net asset value.
ZCSH had traded as much as 24% below the value of its underlying coins as recently as June. The ETF structure, with its creation and redemption mechanism, erased that gap and added to the return on top of Zcash's price surge.
Betting on Hyperliquid
Another winner flying under the radar is Hyperliquid. The Bitwise Hyperliquid ETF (BHYP) is up 118% since it launched in May.
Hyperliquid is a blockchain built for decentralized finance, and its focus is derivatives, including pre-IPO perpetuals that let traders take positions on private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic before they go public.
The blockchain was designed with a mechanism that ties the HYPE token directly to platform activity. The protocol collects fees when users trade, and roughly 97% of those fees flow into a fund that continuously buys HYPE on the open market and pulls it out of circulation.
More trading means more buying pressure on the token, which is Hyperliquid's answer to a long-running knock on Ethereum, that network growth doesn't reliably accrue to token holders.
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