Net inflows to spot bitcoin ETFs headed toward $9 billion on Thursday amid a price surge in the cryptocurrency.
Inflows hit $405 million for the day, the third largest total since the SEC approved the new products in early January, according to Bloomberg data. Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust GBTC was the outlier, suffering more than $101 million in outflows to continue its losing streak. Not counting GBTC, flows are at $8.56 billion, the data show.
“Cointucky Derby Update. BIG net inflow day of over $400 mln.,” wrote Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart in a Friday morning post on the social media platform X/Twitter.
Seyffart noted that eight of the 10 ETFs that began trading Jan. 11 “took in money” Thursday and that the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) “officially” became the second fund to cross $3 billion in AUM following BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).
FBTC and IBIT accounted for more than $332 million of the outflows combined on Thursday. GBTC has hemorrhaged more than $6.2 billion in assets since debuting as an ETF. It had previously operated as a trust before the SEC okayed its conversion along with the other approvals.
Meanwhile, the price of ETFs focused on the crypto space, including Bitwise Crypto Industry Innovators ETF (BITQ), whose holdings include miners and crypto exchange Coinbase, have been rising over the past week with BITQ up more than 16% over that period.
Bitcoin’s Surge
Bitcoin was recently trading at $47,800, up almost 6% over the past 24 hours. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has spiked more than 10% during the past seven days, its highest level since early January.
The surge in BTC and other risk-on assets have dovetailed with upbeat earnings from AI-serving, semiconductor companies ARM Holdings Plc and Nvidia Corp. The latter has jumped more than 34% over the past month to hit an all-time high.
In a note to investors earlier this week, crypto exchange LMAX Digital predicted that bitcoin would top $50,000, reaching “a fresh yearly high,” while other analysts have been even more upbeat.
In a note to etf.com, Stephane Ouelette, CEO of digital asset-focused advisory platform FRNT Financial, wrote that the post-ETF approval slump in bitcoin stemmed from an “unwinding of prepositioning and some muddled market dynamics resulting from clients leaving GBTC.”
“As a result of long-time locked-up clients exiting the high-fee GBTC and potentially re-entering via other products, we saw understandable range-bound trading and choppiness,” he added. “Those dynamics appear to have now largely stabilized, and the pre-ETF trends playing out in a low-volume, low-attention rally seem to be reemerging.”