Bitcoin price was above $68,000 at the time of writing, with a brief attempt at $69,216. The market started off well on Sunday, and the strong performance of Bitcoin‘s price is motivating altcoin investors. Recently, the focus is on BlackRock, the largest asset manager supporting crypto since June 2023, now also becoming the largest in this field.
BlackRock and Bitcoin
The world’s largest asset management company BlackRock filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF in November 2023, and today’s events were predicted 7-8 months ago. The demand is high, and the efforts of a trusted company like BlackRock are increasing confidence in BTC within traditional financial markets.
BlackRock officials have probably been telling themselves for a long time how correct their decision was, looking at volume data. In just two months, BlackRock’s BTC assets rose to 196,065 BTC, surpassing MicroStrategy’s reserve of 193,000 BTC. BlackRock’s leading Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, has seen significant interest from investors since its launch in January, with BTC reserves growing exponentially.
Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein interprets the ongoing strong demand through the ETF channel as “suppressed interest”.
“We see a tremendous demand and inflow from investors. This is leaving the daily market supply (miner issuance) far behind.”
BlackRock’s daily BTC demand has often exceeded the total miner issuance by 14-15 times.
Gold and Bitcoin
ETF expert Nate Geraci looked at the past two months from a different perspective and compared the situation with gold. Geraci highlighted the excitement by pointing out that the demand for nine new spot Bitcoin ETFs in the last two months surpassed the total inflow to all physical gold ETFs in the last five years.
Spot Bitcoin ETF’s volume over two months exceeded $100 billion. On many days, BlackRock’s ETF was among the most sought-after within all US-based ETFs. Since launch day, 4% of the total Bitcoin supply has entered issuer reserves. The supply shortage could deepen under current conditions as only $140 billion worth of Bitcoin remains on centralized crypto exchanges.
