Are The Rising Bitcoin ETF Volumes The Reason Behind BTC’s Surge to $68K?

BTC prices tapped $68,551 in early trading in Asia on March 5. This is just 0.7% away from its all-time high of $69,044 recorded 26 months ago on November 10, 2021, according to CoinGecko.

The asset added a further 7% in the past 24 hours, but the bears managed to intervene and pushed it down to $67,000 as of now.

On March 4, CryptoPotato reported that Bitcoin had already reached an all-time high in several other currencies, including British Pounds and Euros. It has also hit a peak in Australian Dollars, Chinese Yuan, and Canadian Dollars.

Remarkably, chart guru and technical analyst Willy Woo said it wasn’t even a bull market yet.

So you think we’re in a bull market?

We’re not, this has been the warm up. A full fundamentals driven bull market is marked by a break of the upper blue band.

When it breaks, TradFi is in for a shock. pic.twitter.com/4v6oSm3mAk

— Willy Woo (@woonomic) March 5, 2024

Bitcoin ETF Volumes Surge

The move has followed a whopping 60% gain for Bitcoin over the past 30 days. It has been largely driven by spot ETFs, which have been hoovering up the asset and seeing record daily trading volumes.

More than $7.5 billion worth of BTC has been recorded as aggregate inflows to the new nine spot ETFs since their launch in mid-January. This is despite a massive outflow from Grayscale’s recently converted GBTC fund.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas reported that March 4 was the second-biggest trading volume day for the ten ETFs, with around $5.5 billion.

BlackRock’s IBIT fund did $2.4 billion alone, he said before adding that it had crossed $11 billion in assets under management.

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju said there would likely be a “sell-side liquidity crisis” this year due to those ETF inflows.

We’ll likely see a #Bitcoin sell-side liquidity crisis this year anyway.

Fresh capital from spot ETFs has seen a 95% MoM, excluding GBTC. At this rate, holdings could surpass a couple of million $BTC this year.

Exchanges, miners, and their affiliated addresses hold 3M BTC. pic.twitter.com/iBOEAOBAkY

— Ki Young Ju (@ki_young_ju) March 4, 2024

Macroeconomics outlet ‘Macro Scope’ reported that more ETF filings from large investment firms will continue to roll in this year.

“Wall Street firms continue to file for Bitcoin ETF exposure in their in-house investment funds. You’re going to see a lot of this in the coming months.”

Elsewhere on Crypto Markets

Total capitalization is up 5.5% to $2.63 trillion but remains down 15% from its all-time high. This means that the altcoins are getting left behind while Bitcoin marches ahead.

Ethereum is up 4% topping $3,600 for the first time in over two years but it remains 26% down from its all-time high.

The two meme coins DOGE and SHIB were on fire with gains of 25% and 87%, respectively at the time of writing. Increases for the rest of the altcoins were modest as they slowly tried to catch up with big brother Bitcoin.