U.S.-listed spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds are “off to a flying start” and as of April 10 had more than $58 billion in assets, a CFRA Research report said.
“As a point of comparison, gold ETFs in the U.S. had $107 billion in assets as of April 9,” the report said. “Just three months after their launch, the assets in spot bitcoin ETFs are more than half of the aggregate assets invested in gold ETFs.”
Eleven spot bitcoin ETFs were listed in the U.S. as of April 10 and as of that date had $58.02 billion of net assets, the report said.
Nine of them were launched as new funds on Jan. 11, the report said. The two others were existing bitcoin-related products that converted to spot bitcoin ETFs — the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and the Hashdex Bitcoin ETF.
The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, known by the ticker symbol GBTC, was uplisted to an ETF on Jan. 11, while the Hashdex product did not convert to a spot bitcoin ETF until March, said Aniket Ullal, head of ETF data and analytics at CFRA.
“The nine nonconverted ETFs took in a staggering $27.5 billion in aggregate net new flows since their launch, through April 11,” the report said. “These inflows have been offset by outflows of $15.6 billion from the uplisted GBTC, which has a higher fee relative to its competitors.”
The flow numbers make it clear that spot bitcoin ETFs “have brought fresh capital into the category, and not all the money being piled into the new ETFs is from investors reallocating from GBTC,” the CFRA report said.