4 crisp charts to celebrate a legendary month of bitcoin ETFs

First-day buyers of spot bitcoin ETFs have been left holding the bag over the last month. But no longer.

Anyone who bought and held shares in any of the spot bitcoin ETFs before today would be in the green.

Bitcoin spiked to $48,000 as the ETFs opened trade on Jan. 11 — two year highs — before retracting more than 20% over the following two weeks.

Now, on the first day of their second month of trade, bitcoin (BTC) threatens to blast past $50,000 and is up 13% year to date.

That’s one way to buy the dip

The 10 physically-backed bitcoin funds altogether saw almost $36 billion in trade in their first month, according to market data compiled by Blockworks.

Grayscale’s bitcoin trust (GBTC) made up more than half of those volumes, perhaps boosted by the closure of its nagging NAV discount presenting a final arbitrage opportunity.

BlackRock and Fidelity’s offerings followed with $8.31 billion and $6.53 billion, respectively.

Click play to watch the spot ETFs go ‘brrrrr’ — they slow before picking up again

Volumes only tell us roughly how popular shares are among traders, who may only be interested in capitalizing on bitcoin’s trademark volatility rather than holding the ETFs long-term.

The dollar value of funds flowing in and out of each ETF is a better indicator of investor sentiment.

Not counting GBTC, investors piled more than $9 billion into US-listed spot ETFs in their first month.
GBTC shareholders pulled $6.38 billion from the former closed-ended fund over that time.
Spot ETFs overall have seen net inflows of $2.63 billion to date.

Inflows to spot ETFs are now easily outpacing GBTC outflows

BlackRock and Fidelity’s products are some of the most popular in ETF history, while GBTC outflows have largely been attributed to its high management fee relative to its rivals, 1.5% compared to 0.25% from BlackRock and Fidelity.

BlackRock and Fidelity so far lead the pack for inflows, having respectively pulled in $3.75 billion and $3.5 billion.

Altogether (and excluding GBTC), the spot ETFs held 206,155 BTC ($10.25 billion) as of Monday morning, per CoinGlass.

Grayscale had nearly a decade of first mover advantage

Those funds manage about 1% of bitcoin’s circulating supply, slightly more than MicroStrategy.

GBTC meanwhile still holds more than 466,000 BTC ($23.2 billion) — more than double all the other US spot ETFs combined.

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.