BlackRock’s Spot ETF Hits $2 Billion In Assets Under Management As Bitcoin Roars Past $42,000

The price of Bitcoin (BTC) rebounded above $42,000 to hit a high of just over $42,743 on Jan. 28, according to data from CoinGecko.

As the BTC rose higher, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) hit the milestone of having $2 billion in assets under management — just two weeks after its debut on the Nasdaq exchange.

Bitcoin Bulls Recapture $42,000 Level

Bitcoin has once again surpassed the psychologically significant $42,000 price level. BTC was hovering at $42,610 at press time, a 2.1% jump on the day.

The wider digital asset market is also showing signs of life as the sector’s total market capitalization currently stands at $1.71 trillion, an increase of 1.5% in the last 24 hours.

The benchmark crypto’s rally above the $42K mark was enough to propel the 49,952 BTC held by the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) as of Jan. 25 to over $2.1 billion. This arguably makes IBIT the first among the newly launched spot BTC ETFs to reach that threshold, just ahead of Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) with $1.8 billion in AUM. 

“The Bitcoin price has pushed IBIT’s assets beyond $2 billion. This plus likely new flows should mean it will be above $2 billion at close,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart observed in a post on the X platform.

Grayscale’s spot BTC ETF has nearly $22 billion in AUM, but its product is a transformation of the crypto asset manager’s flagship GBTC fund. The gap has since shrunk slightly as some investors withdraw money from GBTC, and the new funds accumulate money. 

What Next?

Notably, BlackRock is leveraging its market standing as the biggest asset manager in the world to lure broader audiences to its spot BTC ETF instrument. Nate Geraci, the president of ETF Store, posited that with over $2 billion in AUM, the IBIT is now in the top three ETFs out of the over 600 that have been introduced since the start of 2023. Geraci also believes the iShares BTC ETF will seize the top spot by next week.

BTC was one of the best-performing assets worldwide last year. It was trading for sub-$17,000 at the beginning of 2023 and ended the year at over $42,000. 

But despite some pundits claiming that the price would skyrocket following the historic approval and trading of the long-awaited ETFs on Wall Street, the dormant crypto took a battering after momentarily nearing $49,000. 

Many market watchers and investors are now hoping the impending Bitcoin halving — when the rate of new BTC issued to miners is reduced by 50% — could be a mega bullish catalyst for crypto prices. There is a continuing debate about whether these halving events that happen quadrennially are already priced in. Only time will tell.