Bitcoin ETFs Now Hold Over a Million BTC as Dominant BlackRock Hits New Peak

On a key date in Bitcoin’s history, spot Bitcoin ETFs are writing a new chapter, as allocations to the asset crossed a critical threshold on accelerating interest from investors.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $893 million Wednesday, per data from Farside Investors, pushing the funds' collective Bitcoin holdings to over 1 million BTC. The Wall Street trove has grown by $24.2 billion worth of inflows since the products were approved in January, while nipping away at the heels of crypto’s founding father.

Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, who vanished from the internet in 2011, still holds a whopping 1.1 million Bitcoin worth $79 billion at present. At the current rate that spot Bitcoin ETFs are sucking up coins, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas estimated that the crypto pioneer could be overtaken by the group of eleven Wall Street products in terms of holdings soon.

“At this rate, they’ll pass Satoshi in less than two weeks,” Balchunas wrote on Twitter (aka X) Wednesday. He noted the “Joey Chestnut-level pace” that ETFs are eating up Bitcoin’s supply, referencing the champion competitive eater.

The milestone was reached just short of the 16th anniversary for Bitcoin’s white paper. On Halloween in 2008, Bitcoin’s creator laid the blueprint for his now-preeminent “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” publishing his nine-page thesis for Bitcoin’s design online.

As Bitcoin tests an all-time high price of $73,737, set back in March, spot Bitcoin ETFs have had two of their best days on record. Representing spot Bitcoin ETFs’ fourth best day of inflows, $870 million worth of allocations on Tuesday were followed by Wednesday’s jump to $893 million.

According to Bitwise Head of Research Ryan Rasmussen, institutional investors are leading the charge. While a first wave of inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs was driven by retail investors, wealth managers making investments on behalf of clients are currently catching up.

Large institutions like Merrill Lynch or Wells Fargo have lengthy due diligence and compliance processes, alongside investment committees that vet new types of investments a few times a year, he said. Those companies are now “unlocking their wealth managers,” Rasmussen said.

“Even after ETFs make it through those different committees, [institutions] go through a process of educating their advisors on how to talk to clients about Bitcoin or new assets,” he added. “We saw signs of the second wave entering the market earlier this week.”

Wednesday’s avalanche of allocations included a high watermark for BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT). Some $872 million worth of Bitcoin flowed into the product Wednesday, per data from Farside, topping the asset manager’s previous daily peak of $849 million from March.

Fidelity’s Bitcoin ETF saw the second-largest inflows Wednesday at just $12.6 million, while Bitwise's BITB was the biggest loser with almost $24 million in outflows.

BlackRock’s stunning Wednesday performance brought its ETF’s Bitcoin holdings to around 429,000, towering over the world’s largest corporate treasury reserve holder of Bitcoin, MicroStrategy, at 252,000 BTC.

While MicroStrategy, the self-proclaimed Bitcoin development company, has institutional investors holding its shares, Rasmussen said that the BlackRock brand has ultimately proved more palatable among Wall Street’s wealth management crowd.

“They trust BlackRock,” he said. “They can say, ‘Look, the largest institution in the world is backing Bitcoin in a big way,’ and so it's no longer this contrarian view in the way that it was.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward