As Ether prices struggled in the first quarter of 2025, US-based investment advisory firm Two Prime has reduced ETH support and adopted a Bitcoin-only strategy.
After lending $1.5 billion in loans on both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) for the past 15 months, the two Primes have decided to dump ETH to focus solely on BTC’s asset management and lending, the company announced on May 1.
“ETH’s statistical trading behavior, value proposition, and community culture have failed beyond the attractive points,” Two Primes said.
With ETH losing 45% of its value since the start of the year, the company’s shift to a Bitcoin-only approach comes among optimists who speculate that ETH will potentially be near the bottom and will quickly reverse its negative trends.
“Ether is no longer traded as expected.”
“As an algorithm trading company, we value data more than stories,” said Two Primes.
In addition to separating from Bitcoin, ether is no longer predictable, two Primes argued, adding:
“Now it’s trading like a memocoin, not a predictable asset. Even amid the turbulence of the first quarter of 2025, Bitcoin remained within its basic action, but ETH saw some multi-standard deviation movements.”
Two Primes then continued to say that such conditions “cause headaches” for both algorithmic trading and esback loans. This is because assets are not predicted as “even due to high volatility expectations in the digital asset market.”
Founded in 2019 by Alexander Blum and Marc Fleury, Two Prime is an investment advisory company registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company has provided trading and lending services to both BTC and ETH for the past six years.
Community fights back: ETH bottom signal
Two prime key statements about ether were to quickly induce responses from the community, with many viewing the message as another bottom signal for cryptocurrency.
“What a delayed essay statement,” a market observer wrote to X, citing the high volatility of the S&P 500 to reduce YTD by 4.7%.
“I’ve never even heard of them. It seems irrelevant,” another commentator said, expressing doubt about whether the community should rely on two Prime’s changing approach to the ether.
“If this is not the bottom signal for ETH IDK (I don’t know).
Who else has dumped ETH in the past few months?
The two Primes also mention a slower performance of Ether Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFS), highlighting that BTC ETF purchases have outperformed ETH almost 24 times.
“ETH’s ETF failure creates a reflective loop for agencies like BlackRock to have fewer resources dedicated to promotion and sales. BTC discovered the mainstream while ETH was in flounder,” the company said.
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Despite its poor performance, ether ETFs are the largest AltCoin of crypto ETFs in terms of managed assets (AUM), far outweighing others like Solana (SOL) and XRP (XRP).
According to the latest update from Coinshares, ether-based exchange trade products had won $9.2 billion in AUM by the end of last week, with Solana and XRP continuing with $1.4 billion and $1 billion respectively.
After being approved by the US SEC in May 2024, the Spot Ether ETF has gotten off to a late start in 2024, with performance losing ground compared to the massive Spot Bitcoin ETF debut.
Amidst low investor demand, some issuers like Vaneck retracted the proposal for the Ethereum Trust ETF in September 2024, and in March 2025, ARK settled futures ETFs on both Ether and Bitcoin.
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