Coinspeaker
BlackRock’s BTC ETF Outpaces Grayscale’s GBTC on This Front
BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF, iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), posted a stellar performance on February 1, outpacing Grayscale’s GBTC on the daily trading volumes. Since the launch of spot BTC ETFs, GBTC has dominated the trading volumes.
However, BlackRock’s BTC ETF recorded 12.38 million in trading volumes during the market close on the first day of February. In contrast, GBTC posted 7.61 million in trading volumes on the same day. But the overall daily trading volume on February 1 was 929 million, the first time the ETFs have traded below 1 billion since the launch.
Still some after hours trading left but looks like BlackRock's $IBIT is the first ETF to trade more than Grayscale's $GBTC in a single day.
Total trading today was kind of a dud though at $924 million — first day below $1 billion in dollar volume for the group since launch. https://t.co/IeIF2COm4F pic.twitter.com/ZtADLBQP63
— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) February 1, 2024
BlackRock Scales Its BTC ETF Market Share
It’s worth noting that inflows didn’t mark the previous 3-week dominance in trading volumes by GBTC. After it changed to ETF, the GBTC has bled close to $6 billion as of February 2, amidst high fees and availability of several alternatives to its previous investors.
So far, Fidelity’s Wise Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) and BlackRock’s IBIT have posted $6 billion in cumulative inflows in the past three weeks. Both funds charge a sponsors’ fee of 0.25% compared to GBTC’s 1.5%. Market watchers have cited GBTC’s high fees as one of the reasons for its outflows.
It is worth noting that BlackRock has been an aggressive competitor, waiving its fees to 0.12% in the first 12 months before the fund hit $5 billion in AUM (assets under management). Its approach is bearing fruits.
GBTC’s overall BTC holding has since tanked below 500K as of press time. On the contrary, BlackRock and Fidelity have accumulated over 120K BTC at the time of publication. Ark 21Shares BTC ETF (ARKB) and Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) followed closely with a total of +30K BTC in holding.
Collectively, the spot BTC ETFs market cap hit a new high of $29.7 billion on 2 February as BTC recovered slightly after the US Fed’s rate decision. The king coin was up 0.97% in the past 24 hours, as per CoinmarketCap data. It is exchanging hands at $42.6K.
In the meantime, Glassnode, a data intelligence platform, noted that the strong BTC capital inflows and recent supply overhang from GBTC trades had delayed a much-expected BTC price acceleration to its all-time high. Based on the press time level of $42.6k, BTC needs to rally +60% to hit its previous all-time high of $69k.
