As of Wednesday, the aggregate amount of bitcoin held by the exchange-traded funds (ETFs) was 192,255, which is over 2,000 higher than the amount held by MicroStrategy, the biggest publicly traded cryptocurrency holder.
With the exception of Grayscale’s GBTC, the new spot bitcoin ETFs currently contain more bitcoin than MicroStrategy.
“Concentration of coins held by these entities is not a risk to the Bitcoin Network,” according to one analyst.
GBTC is not included in this since it was an operating fund prior to its conversion to an ETF.
With the exception of Grayscale’s GBTC, the newly established spot bitcoin ETFs added around 5,000 tokens to their holdings on Wednesday, bringing their total to over 192,000 BTC. This surpasses MicroStrategy (MSTR), whose holdings as of the end of January were 190,000.
Even though the funds have only been available for a little over a month, investors wishing to acquire exposure to bitcoin without having to purchase and keep it directly have contributed billions of dollars. Bloomberg Intelligence data shows that inflows into the ETFs totaled over $1 billion on Wednesday alone.
One spot ETF, Grayscale’s GBTC, which started trading as a spot product at the same time as the other funds, is not included in these figures. Prior to its years as an active closed-end trust, GBTC started out as a spot ETF with about 630,000 bitcoin. Due to profit-taking or a desire for reduced costs, tokens have been leaving GBTC over the past month; as of yesterday, the fund held slightly more than 470,000 bitcoin.
According to Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO and head of operations at California tech firm XY Labs, “we have seen bitcoin become an increasingly more distributed network over time in terms of the number of holders and their coins.” The concentration of coins held by organizations like MicroStrategy and similar ETFs does not pose a risk to the Bitcoin Network, but it might become a problem if too much Bitcoin ends up becoming excessively concentrated in any one nation or business.
According to the cryptocurrency’s code, there can only be 21 million bitcoin in total. This means that the ETF issuers (ex-GBTC), which include major asset management companies like Fidelity, VanEck, and BlackRock, have teamed up with MicroStrategy to hold about 1.8% of all bitcoin that will ever be available. When 470,000 tokens from GBTC are included, the ratio increases to 4%.