Spot Bitcoin ETF: BlackRock Finally Outshines GBTC in This Metric

In terms of spot Bitcoin ETF trading volume, investment asset management firm BlackRock’s IBIT has finally overtaken Grayscale’s GBTC.

Mounting Competition in Spot Bitcoin ETFs

According to data provided by Bloomberg Intelligence, the total trading volume recorded by BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF as of February 1 was around $303.4 million while that of Grayscale’s GBTC was $291.7 million. The sudden move by BlackRock over Grayscale is not entirely surprising as the former has been closing in on the latter in the last few days.

Grayscale, BlackRock, and Fidelity Investments have occupied the position of the top three-performing spot Bitcoin ETFs for the past weeks. 

Meanwhile, the activities in the market suggested that BlackRock and Fidelity Investments are in tough competition with Grayscale. As a formidable contender of GBTC, BlackRock has been seeing impressive and steady growth in its spot Bitcoin ETF volume which came in at $250 million as of January 31 while Fidelity, achieved a trading volume of $207 million at the time.

Update for The #Bitcoin ETF Cointucky Derby. Total net inflows of +$38 mln yesterday. -$182 mln left $GBTC. Newborn Nine took in +$220. As stated yesterday, it was the first day that one of these new ETFs ( $IBIT) traded more than $GBTC. pic.twitter.com/kFz8zFxjJc

— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) February 2, 2024

Since launch, the stiff competition kept getting tougher by the day. By the end of trading day 13, $247 million was registered as the total trading volume from BlackRock with Grayscale’s pegged at $221 million. Grayscale’s GBTC flows were highlighted as $397.2 million on January 30 while BlackRock traded $385.8 million. However, the latest market data confirms that IBIT is now ahead of GBTC by more than $10 million in trading volume. 

With IBIT now on the first position in terms of trading volume, GBTC moves to second place while Fidelity’s FBTC retains the third position. Fidelity’s trading volume was $171.1 million followed by ARK 21Shares ARKB at $75.5 million and Bitwise BITB at $30.7 million.

Almost $1B in Trading Volume Recorded

Valkyrie, which recently adopted BitGo as its custodian alongside Coinbase, seems to have the lowest performance among spot Bitcoin ETF issuers. 

The same Bloomberg Intelligence data shows that BRRR recorded only $1.6 million in trading volume as of February 1. Altogether, the ten spot Bitcoin ETFs approved by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have registered a total trading volume of $929.2 million as of February 1.

On one hand, Bitcoin has been fluctuating since the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs. Immediately after the SEC greenlighted the product, the price of Bitcoin surged to $46,000 but this gyration was short-lived. 

In less than one week, the flagship cryptocurrency plunged to around $38,000. In the last few days, Bitcoin has been recovering and at the time of this writing, the coin was trading at $42,927.47, up by 2% in the past 24 hours.