Bitcoin fell to the lowest price level since the US approved nearly a dozen exchange-traded funds that hold the cryptocurrency last week.
“Now that the ETF hype has faded a bit, it would make sense for traders’ attention to be focused elsewhere,” said Bartosz Lipiński, chief executive officer at Cube.Exchange, a trading platform. “Current options positioning suggests support around $40,000, which is a major psychological price point.”
The largest cryptocurrency fell as much as 4.3% to $40,809, and is down around 11% following the Jan. 10 sign-off by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Bitcoin rallied almost 160% last year amid optimism the funds would broaden demand.
Read more: What Are These New Bitcoin ETFs and How Do They Work?: QuickTake
That has traders closely monitoring the inflows into the ETFs. BlackRock Inc.’s fund has already passed $1 billion in investor inflows, making it the first in the group to surpass the milestone since the funds started trading last Thursday.
Investors deposited $371 million in the BlackRock fund on Wednesday, pushing IBIT past the milestone, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Fidelity Investments is close behind. The company’s FBTC Bitcoin ETF saw $358 million in inflows yesterday — the highest single day tally since the fund launched a week ago. In total, about $880 million have flowed into Fidelity’s fund. BlackRock and Fidelity have driven early consolidation in the new asset, with the two firms receiving 68% of all inflows across the nine new ETFs on the market, totaling nearly $2 billion.
A significant portion of inflows are coming from investors leaving Grayscale Investment’s GBTC fund, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, which was created in 2013, had over $28 billion in assets under management when it converted to an ETF, but has seen about $1.6 billion in outflows since trading started.
“Another unique kink is the GBTC situation,” said Michael Safai, founding partner at quantitative trading firm Dexterity Capital. “Many investors wanted to wait for the Grayscale discount to collapse prior to exiting their positions. Now that the discount is virtually gone, some newly liberated traders may have sold and are waiting to get back into ETFs soon.”
Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF has a sector-high management fee of 1.5%. Management fees at BlackRock and Fidelity are a fraction of GBTC’s cost, but they do not have the lowest fees in the group of new Bitcoin ETFs — that title goes to Franklin Templeton with its 0.19% management fee. Despite its industry-low fee, Franklin has received less than 2% of inflows across the broader Bitcoin ETF group.
Publicly traded companies tied to the digital-asset market also extended their slide. Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange, fell about 6.7%, and is down 17% since the approvals. Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital dropped 6.9% and Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy slumped 3%.
