Bitcoin ETFs Rake in $1.8B as Institutional FOMO Hits Overdrive
Wall Street’s latest gold rush shows no signs of slowing—Bitcoin ETFs just vacuumed up another $1.8 billion in seven days. The ’safe’ money is now betting harder on crypto than your average degen.
Why the feeding frenzy? TradFi giants finally realized hodling beats explaining negative-yielding bonds to clients. BlackRock and friends now run the biggest BTC accumulation scheme since Satoshi’s basement mining rig.
Cynical take: Nothing unclogs the regulatory pipes quite like the smell of asset managers’ 2% fees on a hot new product. The SEC’s ’protection’ racket never looked so profitable.
Flows “back in a big way”
Speaking on a panel at Token2049 Dubai last week, BlackRock’s Robert Mitchnick said that Bitcoin ETF flows “are back in a big way.”
Mitchnick added that institutions and advisory firms are accounting for an increasingly large share of total BTC ETF flows, whereas high-net-worth individuals were more predominant when ETFs first launched.
At the outset, it certainly was predominantly retail,” he said. “But then you also have the two other segments that are really important here, which is wealth advisory and institutional.”
BlackRock’s Head of Digital Assets also suggested that the attraction of Bitcoin ETFs was tied to how BTC has been increasingly behaving like a SAFE haven, or a hedge that’s not correlated to the monetary risks arising from any particular country.
This would play into the notion that BTC has been benefitting from a flight away from U.S. assets, with treasury yields rising in recent weeks in response to the Trump administration’s stop-start crusade on tariffs.
And while Bitcoin has been profiting at the expense of U.S. government bonds (and recently gold), it has also been increasing its dominance of the cryptocurrency market.
The BTC dominance ratio currently sits at its highest level in four years, as major altcoins such as Ethereum, Solana and Dogecoin remain well below highs recorded in January.
The possible approval of ETFs for the likes of XRP and Dogecoin later in the year may help rectify this imbalance, yet the recent experience of Ethereum—which already has active ETFs in the US—arguably suggests otherwise.
As noted above, Bitcoin ETF inflows far outstripped those for Ethereum ETFs last week, with CoinGlass’ Digital Asset Fund Flows report showing that the latter attracted a relatively modest $149.2 million in net flows.
