As the battle to be the top Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider in the U.S. rages on, the gap at the top has shrunk to $1.5 billion.
The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) is currently top of the table with $18.7 billion assets under management (AUM), which includes approximately 297,000 Bitcoin. However due to months of outflows from GBTC, the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is putting pressure on the table leaders.
Now with $17.2 billion AUM, BlackRock’s fund is only $1.5 billion away from flipping GBTC. To put this in perspective, the third placed fund on the Bitcoin ETF table is more than $7.5 billion behind.
This comes after Bloomberg senior ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas, predicted that IBIT would flip GBTC by the end of April. It’s looking unlikely that this prediction will be proven correct—but it likely wasn’t far off the mark.
BlackRock’s IBIT fund has seen four consecutive days of flows slowing down, which seems the most likely culprit for the Bloomberg analysts’ prediction not ringing true. However, prior to this stunted growth the fund had seen 71 straight days of inflows, putting it halfway to setting a new record for ETFs.
Since its first day of trading, IBIT has yet to have a day of outflows—when more money left the fund than was put in. In contrast, Grayscale’s GBTC has only ever seen net outflows since its creation, according to CoinGlass data.
On its worst day, March 19, GBTC saw an outflow of $618.2 million. Even if IBIT matched its best inflow of $856.53 million from March 12, the fund would still be $25 million short of flipping the table. Neither fund has seen those kinds of flows in the past two weeks, however. Since mid-April, IBIT’s daily inflows have only topped $30 million once.
Despite this, in the two weeks since Balchunas’ prediction, the gap between IBIT and GBTC has shrunk by nearly half from $2.3 billion to $1.5 billion.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
