Ethereum Rallies on Treasury and SEC News, But Its Biggest Buyer Has Gone Quiet

• Ether is trading near $2,375, up more than 20% over the past week, after a U.S. Treasury debt-buyback expansion and a new SEC crypto-token proposal.
• U.S. spot ether ETFs pulled in roughly $189 million on Aug. 19 alone, their strongest single day since October, snapping weeks of outflows.
• BitMine Immersion Technologies, which holds 4.8% of all ether, has cut its own weekly purchases to a fraction of its spring pace even as its chairman publicly cheered the rally.

Ether climbed more than 20% over the past week to trade near $2,375 on Friday, after the U.S. Treasury Department moved to buy back more of its own long-term debt and the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules for selling crypto tokens to the public.

The Treasury said on Aug. 19 that it will raise the size of its long-end buyback operations from a $2 billion cap to at least $4 billion per operation starting Sept. 9, a step it described as supporting liquidity in the market for longer-dated bonds. A day earlier, the SEC proposed a rule called Regulation Crypto Assets that would let companies raise up to $75 million a year from crypto token sales under lighter disclosure requirements than a full public stock offering.