BlackRock’s ETF chief says 75% of its bitcoin buyers are crypto fans new to

SALT LAKE CITY — A year ago, Samara Cohen believed there was so much pent-up demand for bitcoin that she and her team at BlackRock launched one of the first-ever spot bitcoin exchange-traded products in the U.S. Now investors are flocking in, and a lot of them are crypto enthusiasts who are new to Wall Street.

Cohen, who heads up the asset manager’s exchange-traded funds and index investments as chief investment officer, told CNBC that BlackRock now sees the demand was for a better way to access bitcoin. “It was for the ETF wrapper,” she told CNBC on stage at the Permissionless Conference in Utah.

The total market cap of all eleven spot bitcoin ETFs now tops $63 billion, with total flows of nearly $20 billion. In the last five trading days alone, spot bitcoin ETFs have seen net inflows of more than $2.1 billion, with BlackRock accounting for half of those sales.

The spike in trading volume comes as bitcoin hit its highest level since July this week, trading above $68,300. Bitcoin ended the third quarter up around 140% from the same quarter a year ago, outpacing the S&P 500, as these spot token funds and the crypto market cap move higher in lock-step. Crypto-aligned stock Coinbase closed up about 24% this week, its best week since February.

Cohen told CNBC that part of the strategy for attracting customers to its funds was teaching crypto investors about the benefits of exchange-traded products (ETPs).

13F filings, which offer quarterly reads on equity positions taken by large investors, show that 80% of the buyers of these new spot bitcoin products in the U.S. are direct investors. Of the 80% of direct investors, Cohen told CNBC that 75% had never before owned an iShare, one of the best-known and largest ETF providers on the planet.

“So we went into this journey with the expectation that we needed to educate ETF investors on crypto and on bitcoin specifically,” said Cohen. “As it turns out, we have done a lot of education of crypto investors on the benefits of the ETP wrapper.”

Before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission green-lit spot bitcoin funds in January, investors had a few ways to buy and custody cryptocurrencies. A centralized exchange like Coinbase was among the most user-friendly options for U.S investors. But the blockbuster debut of bitcoin ETPs has laid bare to Cohen and others across Wall Street, that crypto exchanges weren’t giving digital asset investors everything they needed.

It helps that the U.S. is a huge market for digital assets. New data from Chainalysis shows that North America remains the biggest crypto market globally, accounting for nearly 23% of all crypto trading volume. The blockchain analytics platform estimates that between July 2023 and July 2024, there was $1.3 trillion in on-chain value received.

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