Spot bitcoin ETF flows: Where the money is going
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) prices jumped this week, briefly touching $52,000 amid rising demand for spot bitcoin ETFs. The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) saw the highest inflows at $5.2 billion. However, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) lagged with over $6 billion in outflows.
Yahoo Finance Senior Markets Reporter Jared Blikre breaks down the details.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
JOSH LIPTON: Crypto getting an optimism boost as Bitcoin prices surge this week. Here with all the details is Yahoo Finance's very own Jared Blikre. Jared.
JARED BLIKRE: That's right, Josh. I thought we'd do a quick update on the ETF and looking at all the flows into the spot Bitcoin ETFs and some of the converted ones. GBTC, that's Grayscale. That has actually experienced $6.9 billion worth of outflows this year, and that's counteracting a lot of inflows. In fact, without GBTC, there would have been inflows of $11-- well, yeah, $11 billion. You take that out, it's not even quite $5 billion.
But after GBTC, we've seen-- we've seen the IBIT offering. That's iShares through BlackRock. That has actually gained $5.2 billion. That's in the number-one spot. Following that is Fidelity, $3.7 billion. And then you have Ark with about a billion, $1.2 billion. Trails off from there.
But I thought it would be interesting to show the actual fund size as well. Now as a reminder, the Grayscale offering, that came out years ago-- in fact, 2013. Recently converted to an ETF. So not surprisingly, it has the most assets at about $23 billion. And then you take a look at what's in second place. IShares has about 15%, 16% of the volume. Then the Fidelity offering just a little bit less than that, and it trails off pretty quickly.
There was a huge marketing blitz. IShares/BlackRock really put a lot of dollars to work here because whoever gets these Bitcoin assets is going to have a huge lead in the years to come. So it's a pretty powerful race when you consider all the management fees. A lot of them have waived their management fees even, at least for the first year or up to a certain billion dollars. So we'll see how that race continues.
But now let's just take a look at the seven-day price flows in terms of all this crypto. We have Bitcoin, that's up about 8 and 1/2%, Ethereum up 11%. And now if you take a look at who's winning over the last week, it's actually Ethereum and then Shiba Inu and then Bitcoin Cash. But what's interesting here is that the big guys, Ethereum and Bitcoin, they're pretty much the leaders. When you saw the lead-up years ago to those record prices, you would see Solana, Cardano. Those would be in the forefront, but those are just taking a back seat.
So it's still about the majors here, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Let me just get a quick price check here, and we've got Bitcoin $51,816, guys.
JULIE HYMAN: All right, and we'll see if we get an Ethereum ETF at some point as well. That's something that some investors have been looking forward to. Jared, thank you so much.