A year after BlackRock introduced one of the US’s first spot BTC exchange-traded products, Samara Cohen sees large crowds of retail buyers – ‘Wall Street newbies’ who’d been heading into crypto – clamouring to buy bitcoin through her ETF. Speaking at the conference Permissionless in Utah this spring, Cohen credited the ETF model for creating ‘a means and an efficient way’ to provide access to bitcoin. Since then, the total market cap across the 11 spot BTC ETFs has grown to more than $63 billion – and has attracted more than $2.1 billion in new inflows in just the past five trading days. It’s a money pipeline getting a great deal larger.
In addition to the growth of the market, these products have helped by educating crypto investors.’ Reporting by mainstream news outlets also indicates that 80 per cent of the buyers of these new spot bitcoin products are direct investors, and ‘most’ are iShare-holders who are ‘buying the product’ and so ‘they are learning about ETPs’. It’s a paradigm shift in terms of approach with crypto investors being educated on ETPs for the first time. In the midst of regulators finally approving bitcoin ETPs and bitcoin prices further rising to ever higher heights, the success of bitcoin ETPs signifies a greater integration of cryptocurrencies into the broader investment world.
Source: CNBC
