Publicly-traded crypto stocks followed bitcoin's rough weekend into the red Monday as a market-wide selloff spooked the digital asset industry.
The exchange Coinbase, miner Riot Platforms, and bitcoin HODLer MicroStrategy all felt the pain as BTC slipped below $50K before clawing back some gains.
JPMorgan analysts noted that “solana is not perceived by investors the same way as ethereum as the main DeFi/smart contract cryptocurrency.”
While VOO might be the largest ETF in the world, IBIT — BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF — is the fastest-growing. And the bitcoin-centered product is on the cusp of a major milestone, reporting that it now holds 802,257 BTC, putting it within a whisker of hitting $100 billion in assets (worth roughly $99 billion in good old-fashioned USD at the time of writing).
Considering that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust launched only 636 days ago, that’s a remarkable speedrun, as individual and institutional investors have embraced cryptocurrency via the exchange-traded fund. For context, VOO took over 2,900 days to hit the same milestone (about eight years).
As noted in a great piece by Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times, IBIT is now a major money-spinner for one of the biggest stalwarts of TradFi. As the largest exchange-traded product in the crypto space, and with a not insignificant expense ratio of 0.25%, the ETF is pulling in somewhere in the region of $250 million of revenue for its asset manager parent company. As Wigglesworth puts it:
“Anyway, it’s heartwarming to see that one of the companies profiting the most from an anarchical, decentralised invention supposedly designed to reorder the global financial system is... BlackRock.”
Bitcoin is down 2.7% from its recent record which saw it passing $126,000, but bitcoin ETFs are still hot.
The ETFs have already amassed more than $2 billion this week, on track to surpass last week’s $3.2 billion in inflows. In total, bitcoin ETFs have just under $165 billion in assets under management, representing 6.78% of the total market cap, SoSoValue data shows.
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust by far took the lion’s share, with $1.8 billion of inflows. The fund is also close to $100 billion in assets, despite not even being 2 years old.
Bitwise CEO Matt Hougan said in a note, “The stars are aligned for a very strong Q4 for flows — more than enough to push us to a new record,” in part thanks to the “debasement trade.”
