By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 29th, 2024
BlackRock has started heavy advertising for its IBIT Bitcoin ETF on Bloomberg’s home page to leverage its position in the current market momentum.
While the overall inflows in the Bitcoin ETF market have remained subdued over the last week, asset manager continues to keep the upward momentum going further. On Thursday, April 10, BlackRock Bitcoin ETF IBIT witnessed a staggering $192 million worth of inflows with its total AUM crossing $15 billion in just three months of launch.
BlackRock’s IBIT ETF currently holds a staggering 266,587 Bitcoins outperforming its peers by a huge margin. Among the newly launched Bitcoin ETFs, Fidelity is in the second spot with assets under management of over $8 billion.
The BlackRock Bitcoin ETF isn’t just dominating the crypto ETF market, but also hitting new milestones in the global ETF market. On Thursday, IBIT’s trading volume skyrocketed to a staggering $300 million within the just first 30 minutes of trading, thereby occupying a spot among the top ten ETFs by trading volume.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg’s senior ETF strategist Eric Balchunas noted that BlackRock, along with Fidelity, witnessed 59 days of continuous inflows for their respective Bitcoin ETFs. This puts them in the top 20 all-time longest daily inflows list. In his post on X, on Thursday, Balchunas lauded BlackRock’s IBIT for hitting the $15 billion milestone.
$IBIT is up over 50% and has taken in $15b in new cash in three months, both of those numbers are double any other BlackRock ETF and they have 421 of them. That is about as hot as the iron gets holmes. https://t.co/lY8jE6Yvl6
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) April 11, 2024
BlackRock Launches Fresh Advertising Campaign for IBIT
In a concurrent move, BlackRock has initiated a new advertising blitz for IBIT on Bloomberg’s homepage. Analyst Balchunas hailed the campaign as “Times Square-sized”, suggesting BlackRock’s proactive stance in leveraging the current market momentum. This comes after a successful February 2024 campaign that garnered praise within the cryptocurrency community.
Additionally, BlackRock has expanded the roster of authorized participants (APs) for its Bitcoin ETF, adding four major Wall Street firms: Citi, Citadel, Goldman Sachs, and UBS. This brings the total number of APs under BlackRock to nine, indicating a growing institutional interest in the cryptocurrency market.
On the other hand, outflows from the Grayscale Bitcoin ETF GBTC have continued. On Thursday, the GBTC outflows stood at $124 million taking the total outflows number to greater than $16.105 billion since launch. The good thing is that the Bitcoin ETF inflows have overshadowed the GBTC outflows.
On the other hand, Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein continues to prolong the decision to drop the GBTC fees. He said that would consider reducing the fees once the Bitcoin ETF investment product starts to mature.