Bitcoin (BTC) ripped to another multi-year high of $49,000 on Thursday within an hour of the first U.S. Bitcoin spot ETFs going live on public markets.
Between all 11 fund providers, Bitcoin ETFs have already traded $1.7 billion in cumulative volume, based on Yahoo Finance data.
- According to Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) has led the pack in terms of volume, trading at least $446 million just 30 minutes after the market opened.
- Meanwhile, Blackrock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) has gathered $388 million in volume, making it the best-performing newly launched fund so far.
- Fidelity’s fund (FBTC) has proven the next most popular, gathering $230 million in volume, followed by Ark Invest/21Shares’ fund (ARKB), which has traded $82 million in volume.
- The cumulative flows have outpaced that of BITO, the Bitcoin futures ETF approved in 2021 which reached $2 billion in AUM shortly after its spot ETF counterparts were greenlighted on Wednesday.
- “No way to know how much of this is flows,” clarified Seyffart, while predicting that a “significant portion” of the volume is likely newly added funds.
- By contrast, Seyffart predicted that much of GBTC’s volume is in the form of outflows.
- The asset manager kept its Bitcoin ETF’s annual management fee significantly higher than competitors at 1.5%, potentially incentivizing some investors to rotate into newer, cheaper competitors boasting sub 0.5% fees.
- Bitcoin rose to $49,007 within minutes of the launch, before dipping back to $47,800 at writing time.