BlackRock filed on August 4 to consolidate the shares of its spot Ethereum fund, posting the notice on the iShares product page. The ETHA reverse split takes effect after the close on October 5. Split adjusted trading starts the next morning. Bloomingbit and Bitcoin World both report the ratio as one for three, which would lift a $14.15 share to roughly $42.45.
iShares lists the fund at a $14.11 market price and a $14.1552 net asset value, against net assets of $5,439,749,269 and 384,360,000 shares outstanding. Divide by three and about 128 million shares remain.
One penny is 7.1 basis points of a $14.11 share
US listed funds quote in penny increments, so ETHA's tightest possible spread is a full cent. Against $14.11, that cent works out to 7.1 basis points. BlackRock charges 25 basis points a year to run the fund. One crossing of the minimum spread therefore costs a trader well over a quarter of a year's management fee.
Take the share to $42.45 and the same penny becomes 2.4 basis points. IBIT closed August 4 at $36.39, where a cent is 2.7 basis points, and that fund has set the house benchmark since its early inflow records. The ETHA reverse split buys the Ethereum product the same tick arithmetic its Bitcoin sibling already had.
Money kept arriving while the share price sank
The obvious reading is that investors walked. They did not. US spot Ethereum funds took in $365.17 million of net inflows during July, their strongest month of the year according to CryptoSlate, while the Bitcoin funds managed $172.43 million. That inverts the flow pattern these products showed a year ago, and sits oddly beside the way large allocators have trimmed altcoin exposure.
What fell was ether. CoinGecko had ETH at $1,867.86 on Tuesday, a $225.46 billion market cap across 120.68 million coins, which puts about 0.00758 ETH behind each ETHA share. Stock Analysis gives the fund a 52 week range of $11.53 to $36.80 and a one year total return of minus 46.62%, so $42.45 would open above the top of that range. Corporate buyers felt it too, which is why one treasury company that aimed at 100,000 ETH now holds 4,765, and why the staking queue stopped paying enough to wait for.
Grayscale ran the same play at 10 to 1
Grayscale consolidated both of its mini trusts on November 19, 2024, five to one on the Bitcoin product and ten to one on the Ethereum one. Those trusts launched cheap by design, while ETHA got there by holding an asset that shed close to half its dollar value in a year.
Two months of ether price action sit between the filing and the October 5 close. Another 30% off ether would leave the ETHA reverse split delivering a $30 share, roughly where IBIT trades today. The number to check on October 6 is the quoted spread, because that is the only thing this exercise was meant to change.
