The iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) launched by the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock.
Since its launch in January with other ETFs in the market, IBIT has recorded massive inflows and is slowly drawing closer to the market share of that of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC).
The daily inflows
According to data from Dune, April 17th saw IBIT record the second-lowest daily inflows of about $24.9 million. Its lowest day of inflows had been recorded on April 9th, when they had stood at $20.4 million.
However, despite recording the second-lowest daily inflows, the market share of the ETF has reached 32.6%, which is not far off from the market share of Grayscale’s GBTC of 36.8%.
Currently, Grayscale has the largest spot Bitcoin ETF, and its bitcoin holdings are valued at approximately $19 billion.
Meanwhile, the total holdings of BlackRock’s IBIT are just $2.2 billion short of that of GBTC, as they are around $16.8 billion.
The fact that IBIT may flip GBTC for first place in the spot Bitcoin ETF market does not come as a big surprise.
After all, GBTC saw its holdings reduce by almost 50% since it started trading on January 11th. Its holdings had stood at 619,220 BTC and have now reduced to 308,105 BTC.
Accumulation pattern
As far as the accumulation patterns are concerned, there has been a slowdown in BlackRock’s bitcoin accumulation since March 13th when it recorded its highest day of accumulation.
This was when the net inflows of the ETF reached a staggering $866 million. However, since its launch, BlackRock has seen its Bitcoin ETF holdings rise.
At launch, the ETF had held a total of 2,621 BTC tokens, but this number has now increased to 272,550 BTC.
There has also been a slowdown in the selling of Grayscale’s Bitcoin since March 19th when the total outflows from GBTC had reached $607 million.
This marked the fourth-largest day of outflows since the ETF’s launch. Data from Dune shows that on April 17th, the outflows from GBTC had dropped to $79 million.
The situation
Since March, there has been a slowdown in cumulative inflows. The ETFs recorded net inflows of more than $199 million last week, which was a reduction from the $2.58 billion in the week starting on March 11th.
The price of Bitcoin has also been subdued because of the slowing ETF inflows. In the last week, it recorded a drop of 10.7% to $62,971.
On April 17th, just days before the halving event, the price of Bitcoin dropped below the $60,000 mark. As for Grayscale’s GBTC, it has recorded a huge sell-off since its launch.
This has resulted in rising selling pressure for Bitcoin. The huge amount of outflows is likely due to the 1.5% trading fee, which is the highest among all Bitcoin ETFs that are currently available.
Meanwhile, BlackRock’s IBIT has a trading fee of 0.25%, while a 0.19% trading fee is applicable in the case of Franklin Templeton’s ETF.