Famous on-chain analyst William Clemente stated that US institutional investors amplified their Bitcoin (BTC) purchases around the time the world’s largest asset management company, BlackRock, applied for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Increase in US Institutional Investors’ Interest in Bitcoin
In an interview with Bitcoin bull Anthony Pompliano, Clemente cited three pieces of evidence that US-based institutional investors have been actively accumulating BTC since BlackRock’s application for a spot Bitcoin ETF with the SEC.
By observing various trading sessions throughout the day, Clemente pointed to an increase in market activity in the US, saying, “We can see the ETF trading has been influential in a few different things. So, who is primarily doing this trading? It appears to be US-based institutional investors. There are two things I’m looking at as evidence. First, what we can see from the Velo data, something called cumulative return by session. We partitioned the data into EU, APAC, and then US trading sessions. What we can see is that particularly since BlackRock’s application for a spot Bitcoin ETF with the SEC, even a bit before that, there was a more active BTC buying in the US compared to other trading sessions.”
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AAPLClemente also added that Bitcoin attracted marginally more attention on Coinbase compared to other crypto exchanges, indicating increased participation from US-based institutional investors.
Emphasis on the Increase in Open Interest in Futures Contracts at CME
The on-chain analyst pointed to the open interest in Bitcoin futures contracts at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) as the third piece of evidence that interest in Bitcoin among US investors is increasing. According to Clemente, since BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF application, there has been a rapid increase in open interest in Bitcoin futures contracts in the global derivatives market, showing that US-based institutional investors are showing more interest in BTC compared to investors in other countries:
And the final piece of evidence is the futures open interest on CME. So this is the total number of pending futures contracts on CME. Who typically trades on CME? Not the weaker cryptocurrency investors who want to benefit from leverage. Traditional types of US-based corporations. After BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF application, there’s been a clear jump in CME futures open positions. During this time, about a billion dollars (worth of) open positions were added.
