Fidelity Gobbles Up 1% of All Bitcoin—Institutional Feeding Frenzy Hits New High

Wall Street's appetite for Bitcoin just turned ravenous. Fidelity—the $4.9 trillion asset manager—just swallowed 1% of the entire Bitcoin supply in a single bite. Institutional demand? More like institutional FOMO.

The whales are here

Forget retail traders. When traditional finance heavyweights start stacking BTC like it's a BlackRock ETF, you know the game has changed. Cold storage wallets are filling faster than a hedge fund's offshore account.

Market impact? Try market earthquake

That 1% grab translates to over 210,000 BTC—enough to make exchanges sweat liquidity. Price volatility? Please. This is the 'hold forever' crowd moving in. The only paper hands here belong to bankers still waiting for 'regulation clarity.'

Meanwhile in TradFi land...

Gold bugs are rewriting their 'store of value' PowerPoints—again. And those 'Bitcoin is dead' analysts? Suddenly pivoting to 'digital gold 2.0' faster than you can say 'asymmetric returns.'

The bottom line: When institutions eat 1% of the fixed supply pie, retail gets crumbs. Welcome to the big leagues—hope you packed diamond hands.

Source: SoSo Value 

Since Q2, the sustained inflows into FBTC have increased its holdings to 199,493 BTC as of 4th of July.

This translates to $22 billion worth of net assets per current prices and 1.02% of the total BTC supply of 21 million coins.  

Q2 institutional BTC demand surge

Fidelity’s BTC ETF growth is part of a broader surge in institutional accumulation from Q2. Notably, ETFs scooped 111,411 BTC in Q2, increasing their overall BTC stash by 8%. 

But public corporate treasuries, led by Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), bought more BTC (131K BTC) and grew their BTC stash by 18%. 

On the ETF side, Fidelity was second only to BlackRock’s IBIT in terms of total BTC holdings. IBIT had 692,887 BTC or 3.3% of the total BTC supply, as of the 4th of July. 

Fidelity vs. BlackRock

However, according to Fintel data compiled by AMBCrypto, IBIT saw higher institutional holder growth of 9% compared to FBTC’s 2.6% in early Q3.

It meant more major institutional players like hedge funds and endowments piled on BlackRock than Fidelity. 

Source: Fintel

However, overall share-holdings and capital allocation were down in early Q3, suggesting a trimmed position likely linked to recent quarter-end rebalancing or diversification. 

That said, the strong demand from ETFs and public treasuries has not managed to juice up the broader spot market demand.

According to CryptoQuant, the apparent demand has dropped to 857K BTC despite ETFs and Strategy buying 748K BTC.

Per the analytics firm, the broader contraction could cap BTC upside in the short term. 

“ETFs and MSTR purchases are a portion of bitcoin demand; overall demand contraction is more than offsetting these purchases, and the acceleration of overall demand growth is what drives price rallies.”

Source: CryptoQuant

As a result, CryptoQuant stated that although ETFs and Strategy’s buys were positive, they ‘are not sufficient to drive prices to fresh all-time highs.’

The asset was valued at $108.8K, at press time, after tagging $110.5k on the 3rd of July.