Weekly Onchain Outlook - Stablecoin Flows Hit 6-Week High
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Key Takeaways
Risk-off sentiment dominates despite ETF inflows — Bitcoin’s brief pump to $74K faded fast amid geopolitical tensions, yet $569M in BTC and $24M in ETH ETF inflows show institutional demand is still quietly present.
Capital is staying in crypto but playing it safe — Stablecoin flows hit a 6-week high at $3.5B, mostly parked in defensive yield positions like sUSDS and USDC-driven DeFi farming rather than directional trades.
Chain-level shifts are reshaping DeFi yield opportunities — Ethereum reclaims stablecoin dominance with $2B in inflows, while Arbitrum and Plasma lose ground to emerging high-yield plays on Base and Sui.
Trading Calendar 🗓️
Bitcoin reached $74K levels after the first ETF inflows last week, but quickly converted into a slump amid vigorous geopolitical tensions and other signs of risk-off sentiment present in the market.
Most macro data do not affect Bitcoin’s major moves, as most readings are neutral and not significant enough relative to the consensus to become market-moving. On the other hand, oil prices surged more than 20% last week to nearly $120 levels, driven by escalating conflict and blocked trade channels (Strait of Hormuz), which raises inflation concerns ahead of the upcoming Fed rate decision.
Winning Categories📈
This week’s winners are a bit diversified, but again — just like the past two weeks — it’s quite interesting to see that most conservative projects like US Treasury-backed stablecoins and yield-bearing stablecoins are the ones winning last week despite the short pump.
This shows that most market participants are still pessimistic about the market, and major players are taking profits and hedging through most relief pumps to secure their positions, anticipating a prolonged downward movement. We can validate this by looking at the aggregated open interest, which is rising while the majority of funding rates remain mostly negative.
ETF Flows🏦
Continuing last week’s momentum, last week recorded another weekly Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF inflow. Bitcoin ETF recorded $569 million, and Ethereum recorded a minor $24M.
This is quite interesting — when the market is in a very volatile and uncertain state, the earlier pump was front-run by the previous week’s ETF inflows and then continued to gain inflows this week.
Even in risk-off markets where geopolitical tensions remain heavily uncertain, institutional demand was still present last week.
Exchange Flows & Whale Behavior 🐋
Despite the price slipping below $70K, one of the more interesting signals last week was on the exchange netflow side. Around 32K BTC left exchanges in a single outflow event, which is a meaningful divergence — price is down, but whales appear to be pulling coins off exchanges rather than selling into the dip.
This is worth paying attention to. When exchange netflow stays consistently negative, it typically means investors are withdrawing net amounts from exchanges rather than depositing, and since the primary reason to deposit onto an exchange is to sell, sustained outflows are generally read as accumulation, not distribution.
Stablecoin Flows🪙
In a very uncertain environment, surprisingly stablecoin flows remains very good - recording the highest flows in 6 weeks, amounting to 3.5B =1.14%, so capital isn’t necessarily rotating out of crypto, especially DeFi - most active traders on-chain are definitely still actively farming yields, especially when borrowing rates are low and incentives are high on certain niched markets and protocols.
Now, just like every other week, the real question is - where is the flow going into?
This week is again quite interesting,m USDC gained more than 2Billlion flows, now if you know USDC - it’s not necessarily used for trading, but most of it is for doing DeFi activities and just stablecoin farmings
sUSDS TVL reaches another All-Time High
One concern persists — and it has been one of the factors that might have saved you from last week’s fake impulsive move: USDS gaining over 10% in weekly change, $700M in a single week, with most of the funds being converted into sUSDS, currently yielding a conservative 4%. This reflects a highly defensive stance.
Not only on-chain, but Sky’s strong performance in terms of TVL gain is also clearly reflected in their token price, as it has outperformed Bitcoin over the last three months since Bitcoin’s peak.
Aside from USDS’s major supply increase, United Stables’ stablecoin also gained massive traction percentage-wise, gaining over 45% over the week, thanks to incentives and very low borrowing rates on Lista DAO (BNB Chain). You can check out our guide on how to benefit from this campaign in our articles.
Overall, stablecoins are still flowing into the ecosystem, but most activity is more conservative rather than allocated into directional trades — mostly farming incentives, farms with low borrow rates, and safe proven yields on-chain.
Alpha Between Chain Flows:
Ethereum finally leads stablecoin inflows after consistently falling behind other smaller chains — this time with a meaningful amount of $2B in USDC and USDS.
Arbitrum is losing its edge with not much interesting stablecoin yield present in the ecosystem right now, driving more and more outflows even as broader stablecoin flows were positive last week. Because of this, HyperEVM has taken over their place as the 6th largest chain in stablecoin supply.
Not only Arbitrum, but Plasma is also losing its edge in incentives and yields. Interesting yields are now mostly concentrated on Ethereum — on newly launched protocols and integrations. Meanwhile, protocols like YO Yield on Base, integrated on Turtle, are delivering 20% yields (already including 11% rewards APR).
Sui’s stablecoin just launched — USDsui — but last week’s flow doesn’t show that the launch was compelling enough to drive meaningful movement into Sui to farm it. Meanwhile, LP opportunities on Bluefin are yielding more than 20% on conservative stablecoin pairs. Is this an opportunity?
Squeezing ~21.6% APR from a Peg:
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