Wall Street’s imminent embrace of digital assets was once a rallying cry for Bitcoin boosters, who believed a suite of suit-wearing investors would inevitably dominate the emerging market. As spot Bitcoin ETFs surpassed Satoshi Nakamoto’s holdings Thursday, they were proven right.
As of Thursday’s market close, spot Bitcoin ETFs collectively held 1,105,690 Bitcoin worth $110 billion, according to CoinGlass data. Issued by 10 asset managers in the U.S., the clutch of products began trading January 11, all except for Grayscale’s Bitcoin Mini Trust.
As Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator (or creators), Nakamoto’s name looms largest in crypto circles. With an estimated 1.1 million Bitcoin held in wallets widely believed to be tied to the Bitcoin inventor(s), the milestone represented an eye-popping stat for ETF watchers, as much as it signaled the market’s maturation past crypto’s long-absent godfather.
Bloomberg ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas described the development as “mind-blowing” on X (formerly known as Twitter), noting the products are “literal babies.” Indeed, the products’ holdings stampeded past that of Bitcoin’s creator, or creators, in less than a year.
In a recent interview with Decrypt, Balchunas had estimated that the Wall Street products could overtake Nakamoto’s estimated holdings by Christmas. However, spot Bitcoin ETFs have pulled in $2.4 billion since Monday in concert with Bitcoin’s historic climb past $100,000 on Wednesday—perhaps an early gift to the BTC faithful.
“It’d be a fitting cap on a storybook launch,” Balchunas told Decrypt Wednesday. “There has never been a launch like this [among ETFs], and there will never be another one.”
Thursday’s development came more than 15 years following Bitcoin’s creation. And regardless of whether Nakamoto’s pseudonym corresponds to an individual or group, it has been established that Bitcoin’s namesake mined as many as 1.1 million Bitcoin in the project’s first seven months.
Nakamoto, who vanished from the public eye in 2011, billed Bitcoin as electronic cash that could flow without the need for financial intermediaries. In that sense, it is somewhat ironic that Wall Street’s most prestigious brands were central to Thursday’s milestone, and that they’ve apparently had such an impact on Bitcoin’s rising value all year long.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has dominated the nascent market for products making Bitcoin investments as frictionless as getting exposure to the S&P 500. On its own, the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) holds 521,000 Bitcoin worth $50 billion, according to CoinGlass.
With Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator overtaken as of Thursday, spot Bitcoin ETFs are writing a new chapter in the asset’s history. From esoteric to enmeshed in mainstream finance, Bitcoin’s embrace on Wall Street is meanwhile just beginning.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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