Driven by strong ETF fund flows and purchases by ETH fund companies, Ethereum rose 56% last month, marking its largest monthly gain since July 2022.
Ethereum just posted its best monthly return in three years, soaring 56%, with one analyst stating that, driven by strong recent ETF fund inflows, Ethereum resembles 'tech stocks from the 90s.'
According to CoinGecko data, ETH's current trading price is $3,862, significantly higher than the opening price of $2,468 on July 1.
According to CoinGlass, this is the first time since ETH surged 56.62% in July 2022 that Ethereum achieved a monthly return rate of 50% or more in a single month.
Bloomberg's senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas attributed ETH's recent price performance to net inflows into spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Balchunas wrote in a post on X: 'With the ETF boom, Ethereum is starting to look like tech stocks in the 90s.'
He further compared Ethereum to the 'tech stocks that just started in the 90s,' believing its acceleration of adoption and network growth is different from Bitcoin's 'new gold' narrative.
Ethereum ETF inflows continued for 19 days.
Last month, spot Ethereum ETFs achieved net inflows for 19 consecutive days, setting a record for the longest streak in history.
From July 3 to July 30, the category of funds saw net inflows of over $5.37 billion, with the highest net inflow recorded on July 16, nearing $727 million across all funds.
BlackRock's iShares Ethereum ETF became the third fastest to reach the $10 billion milestone, achieving this feat in just 251 days.
Meanwhile, in a rare occurrence, the net inflow of Ethereum ETFs in July surpassed the net inflow of Bitcoin ETFs for six consecutive days.
Despite the rise in ETH's price, not everyone is excited about the level of activity occurring at the protocol level.
10x Research CEO Markus Thielen told Cointelegraph: 'When we look at the actual revenue generated by the Ethereum network, we find it very low,' adding that Ethereum's revenue has seen no meaningful growth over the past six months.
Thielen noted that network activity has only increased by 5% over the past month, with revenue growing by just 3%. Additionally, he observed that 90% of the price volatility over the past month came from the Asian time zone.
He recalled that in November 2021, Ethereum, with a market cap of $300 billion, had a monthly revenue of $1.5 billion. This equates to an annual return of 6%, which could be very attractive to institutional investors.
The situation is quite different today; according to Token Terminal data, Ethereum's market cap is $466 billion, while its annual revenue is only $764 million.