Bitcoin Spot ETFs Witness $1.18 Billion Influx in Debut Week
The first week sees $1.18 billion influx, Bitwise leads with the lowest fees and Grayscale dominates trading volume. Is this the calm before the storm?
I’ll use a decade of traditional finance/corporate experience to refine the chaos into bite-sized chunks for you to digest.
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The Bitcoin (BTC) spot ETFs were all approved this week. But the market value of BTC declined 13% to $42.6K after pumping to $49K temporarily — Was it priced in?
One whale deposited all 2,742 BTC($127.5M) to Binance to take profits after the Bitcoin spot ETF opened trading.
The whale withdrew 2,742 BTC($53M) from Binance between Oct 7, 2022, and Dec 29, 2023, at an average price of $19,337.
Not all of traditional finance (TradFi) was content — Vanguard removed the futures ETFs from its platform.
Our good friend Lizzie also expressed her dissatisfaction with an unfounded statement — thankfully X’s community notes held her accountable for misinformation.
Lizzie’s colleague, Gary, mentioned the risks around Bitcoin ETF trading as they implement one last-ditch, bitter effort to debunk the new-age asset class.
Within 24 hours of the approval, there were $655M of net inflows into the ETFs ($750M when excluding the $95M of Grayscale outflows).
Bitwise led the charge with $237M, or 36% of the net inflows:
The reason? The lowest trading fee — Bitwise was just 0.24%.
Grayscale dominated the volume with $4.2 billion in activity.
There has been $1.18 billion of inflows in the first week — Goldman Sachs commented:
"Bitcoin ETF products saw a collective $625m in primary inflows, with BITB (Bitwise) leading the charge with a total of $237m created. As for on-screen volume, GBTC has traded the most volume on-screen, with over 47m shares on the tape today alone"
JP Morgan predicts up to $36 Billion could pour into the ETFs, even without new capital entering.
We all know institutions want exposure! The higher the price of Bitcoin the more these asset managers will make in fees given the typical 2 and 20 compensation structure.
NFT Market Volume
Ethereum recovers the top spot for NFT market volume this week with $92M in sales (excluding wash trading), although Bitcoin ordinals remain hot on its heels:
Bitcoin Ordinal volume is dominated by NodeMonkes as the value flips Bitcoin Frogs with $10K per floor Monke.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin Puppets leverage its memetic value to push over the $1k floor price and The Shadows mint out at 0.2 BTC ($8.5k) each before dropping below mint price with 0.15 - 0.17 BTC ($6.3K - $7.2K) sales.
A significant portion of the Bitcoin network volume is now ordinal related as maxis suggest the future of generative art is on Bitcoin and that the Bitcoin ETF approval is bullish for ordinals.
ETH trading volume sustained above 10K ETH ($25M) daily, albeit down from 14k ETH last week:
Key catalysts this week include:
A wallet swept numerous squiggles and acquired 13 Punks for 731E ($1.9M).
MAYC are down 20% in a week with 200 underwater Mutant loans on Blur alone + a single farmer has 340 of them all on leverage.
SOL NFT trading volume was 150K SOL ($14.3M) on the day:
Saga Monkes are airdropped to Solana Saga mobile phone genesis token holders for FREE, then subsequently rocket in price to 15 SOL ($1.5K):
The driver? Solana founder, Toly, replace his PFP with one.
Meanwhile Cryptoundeads become the most anticipated mint happening on Solana with many alpha groups vying for a whitelist allocation — there was a lot of speculation around the legitimacy of the project. Wale provides a great post analyzing this notion.
Notable ETH NFT Sales
Punks galore this week as several trade at a premium to the floor price.
Could it be that the ETH rally off the back of the Bitcoin spot ETF approval has driven additional interest to ETH NFT grails?
No significant change in the number of active wallets interacting with NFTs this week.
Headline News
Frame highlights chapter 2 of the airdrop is to go live with its Mainnet launch on 31 January — rumour has it the rewards are twice as juicy.
Mocaverse launches an additional 20k MocaIDs and announces its Anichess collaboration — $100K in prizes are up for grabs!
Eesee closed its funding round and expanded its testnet functionality to mobile — there are 7 billion smartphones worldwide.
Inspect partners with Arbitrum to integrate the social and scalability solutions.
SECGov approves all 11 bitcoin spot ETFs
Other News
ZachXBT receives $150K grant from Optimism.
Ageofdino raised $5.7m from mint
Aiarena_ announces second fundraise of $6m
PlaySHRAPNEL launches a Fortnite map
OthersideMeta next play test is in February
SeedifyFund introduces Seedhub_gaming with gamers’ rewards
OhBabyGames adds new title 'Shoguns Curse' to their library
Azuki releases anime trailer on 2nd anniversary
Imaginary_Ones $BUBBLE launching in Q1
Play_ember announces 2750 supply
PixelPalsAI will have a $120,000 prize pool for the top 100 players
0xDith announces 'programmatic whitelists', a new fairway for WL distribution
0n1Force changed the Twitter logo to Bitcoin colors
Killabearsnft releases a new trailer
HYTOPIAgg announces its own blockchain with an upcoming node sale
AOFverse and Kurorobeast received grant funding from the Arbitrum foundation
PalioAI announces 3333 supply
H/t Moritz for pulling this list together.
That’s a wrap for issue 55 of S4mmy’s Snippets. I hope you enjoyed it.
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Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered investment or financial advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
I hold some of the assets mentioned in this newsletter.