• Bitcoin ETFs hit record $912M inflows, BlackRock and Fidelity drive demand surge.
• Solana ETFs approved in Canada, fueling SOL treasury strategies and massive stock rallies.
• Vitalik Buterin proposes Ethereum upgrade to RISC-V for 100x efficiency in ZK proofs.

IntoTheBlock reported that U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs posted a massive $380 million in net inflows on April 21, the highest figure seen since late January when Bitcoin prices previously touched new highs. The momentum didn’t stop there. By the next day, inflows exploded to $912 million, highlighting a fierce comeback of institutional demand. 

BlackRock’s IBIT commanded the trading boards with 4.2 billion dollars’ worth of volume, followed very closely by Fidelity’s FBTC, which indicates that Wall Street titans are doubling up on crypto exposure.

The Coinbase Premium Index, which is commonly used to measure US institution appetite, also increased, signaling that buyers prefer regulated exchanges even if they are more expensive.

The rally followed Bitcoin breaking above $90,000 once more, confirming evidence that large traders are positioning themselves earlier than larger market movements.

These statistics are not only a reflection of bull sentiment but also a shift towards compliance-driven accumulation strategies with tightening global regulatory regimes.

Solana’s institutionally-driven wave accelerated as Canadian regulators formally endorsed four new Solana staking ETFs from 3iQ, Purpose, Evolve, and CI Financial.

Launched on Toronto Stock Exchange on April 16, these ETFs have a new and innovative design: marrying SOL’s price performance to staking returns ranging from 2% to 3.5%.

Institutions can delegate up to 50% of the ETF’s SOL holdings to staking partners, creating the first regulated vehicle that generates on-chain rewards natively.

GSR, a crypto market maker, also made news by investing a private placement of $100 million in Upexi (UPXI) to launch a Solana treasury accumulation strategy.

Upexi’s drastic transition towards Solana validation activities drove its stock upwards by approximately 700%, which demonstrates how traditional firms are adopting blockchain-native approaches at a large scale. This aggressive adoption by institutions is viewed as a forceful indicator of increasing influence of Solana within corporate treasury models.

Ethereum technical development moved to a turning point following a proposed overhaul of the execution layer of the network by its founder, Vitalik Buterin. Writing on Ethereum Magicians, Buterin proposed substituting the traditional EVM for a system based on RISC-V.

The transition is meant to bring 50–100-fold efficiency gains to zero-knowledge (ZK) proof creation, an emerging point of bottleneck for Ethereum’s scalability aspirations.

Currently, ZK-rollup provers spend roughly half of their processing time executing blocks. By adding a lightweight RISC-V engine, combined with Poseidon hashing algorithms orders of magnitude faster than the current system, Ethereum would be able to cut prover costs and complexity by a significant amount.

Vitalik’s strategy also encompasses backward compatibility through dual VM systems, so all existing smart contracts can continue to function while the network develops.