March was a banner month for volume in the nascent spot bitcoin ETFs.
In March, trading volume for spot bitcoin ETFs surged to $111 million, nearly tripling February’s total of $42.2 billion, according to Yahoo Finance compiled on The Block Data Dashboard. February marked the first full month of trading since the products debuted on January 11, and the significant increase in March highlights the growing interest in these new crypto-based financial instruments.
Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas took to X to point out how important last month was in terms of total trading volume. “Bitcoin ETFs traded $111 billion in March, which is just about triple what they did in February and January,” he said. “I can’t imagine April will be bigger but who knows.”
BlackRock, Fidelity and Grayscale dominate
The three spot ETFs issued by Grayscale, BlackRock and Fidelity continue to dominate trading volume. After Monday’s trading, however, Grayscale’s GBTC fund surpassed $15 billion in total outflows since trading began in January. In bitcoin terms, GBTC, a decade-old trust that Grayscale converted into a spot bitcoin ETF two months ago, has dropped 46% from around 619,000 BTC to 333,619 BTC ($22 billion) since it started trading as an ETF, per CoinGlass.
In dollar terms, last month, BlackRock and Fidelity’s spot bitcoin ETFs hit about $18 billion and $10 billion, respectively, in assets under management, according to CoinShares data. In terms of inflows, the products issued by BlackRock and Fidelity have been the most successful.
During yesterday’s trading, spot bitcoin ETFs returned to net outflows after recording net inflows every trading day last week. Net outflows for Monday were $85.7 million after Grayscale’s fund shed $302.6 million, according to CoinGlass data.
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