After a straight week of outflows for spot Bitcoin ETFs, the funds took in 228.97 BTC yesterday. That’s the first time the net flow has been positive for Bitcoin ETFs since Friday, March 15.
When Bitcoin hit a rough patch of volatility last week, the ETFs saw outflows of nearly $1 billion.
At today’s Bitcoin price, that means the ETFs saw took in roughly $15 million. BTC is currently trading for $71,014.23 after having inched past $70,000 yesterday afternoon. BTC’s market capitalization is now just shy of $1.4 trillion and the world’s oldest and largest cryptocurrency saw $47 billion worth of coins change hands in the past day.
It was the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) that won the day, seeing BTC inflows worth $262 million on Monday. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) saw $35 million worth of new shares created, followed by Franklin Templeton’s Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) with $20.5 million.
It’s very much been the case that Wall Street titans have grown their assets under management faster than their more crypto-specific counterparts, like the Cathie Woods’s ARK Invest or the VanEck.
The outlier in the group has been the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which has been trading on OTC desks since 2013 before it was converted into a spot ETF in January. Since the fund was converted, it’s seen more than $14 billion withdrawn by investors.
Source: CoinGlass
Despite the GBTC outflows, execs and analysts agree the success of the new ETFs has demonstrated that there was pent up demand from institutions for BTC.
“I think you can’t decouple the new demand for Bitcoin with the announcement of the spot ETFs,” Coinbase Asia-Pacific Managing Director John O’Loghlen told Decrypt recently. “I think that that’s a reality that sunk in and then we need to watch where does it go from here.”
Meanwhile, publicly traded crypto exchange Coinbase has seen its shares get a boost from BTC gains. The San Francisco company, whose shares trade under the COIN ticker on Nasdaq, closed at $279.71 on Monday—that’s a 14% gain in a single day. And in pre-market trading early Tuesday morning, the stock has already climbed another 2% to $285.60.
COIN has seen its stock become even more closely tied to Bitcoin because it’s acting as the custodian for the much of the 206,000 BTC backing ETF shares. Analysts are looking forward to seeing just what that’s done for Coinbase’s bottom line during its Q1 2024 earnings call, which is expected to take place in May.
