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.
Venture firm a16z found in its recently released State of Crypto report that more than 40 million Americans hold crypto.
So far, adoption has mostly been through wealth management clients asking advisors to add new spot crypto products to their portfolio.
In August, Morgan Stanley was the first big bank to allow its 15,000 financial advisors to pitch bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity to clients with a net worth over $1.5 million. Other firms are still performing in-house due diligence before allowing their armies of FAs to start actively pitching the funds.
“Wealth manager allocators have not been allocating,” VanEck CEO Jan van Eck told CNBC in Utah. “I mean, they’re barely even warming up.”
Van Eck drew parallels to the European market, where the company has 12 token-based products trading in Europe.
“It’s exactly what we see in Europe,” he said. “Very few private banks have really approved investment in bitcoin or ethereum or anything else in a major way.” Van Eck said his company has about $2 billion in its European crypto ETPs, and that a lot of the volume is from individual investors.
Wall Street needs rules from lawmakers on Capitol Hill before it gets more comfortable with crypto.
ETFs create transparency
Cohen thinks that in a lot of ways, ETFs and blockchain technology are solving for similar things.
“ETFs have been a decentralizing force in TradFi markets that have brought a lot more access and transparency, and importantly, really accelerated in growth during the post crisis 2008, 2009 period,” said Cohen, referring to traditional finance markets.
“I find it incredibly meaningful to look at the fact that the bitcoin whitepaper was published on October 31, 2008, and then you have the G20 leaders from around the world meeting to discuss the aftermath of the financial crisis and how do you create more transparency through public reporting,” Cohen continued.
BlackRock took on less risk by using counterparty clearing and multilateral trading. In TradFi markets, those moves created huge tailwinds for ETFs.
“Then at the same time, DeFi is becoming a reality over the intervening 15 years,” she said.
“Was this a win for Bitcoin? Was this a win for ETPs? To me, the answer is: It’s a win for investors, to the extent we can effectively marry these ecosystems which are solving for the same goals.”