ProShares Bitcoin futures ETF, trading under the ticker ‘BITO’ saw around $1 billion volume on its opening day, with 24.313 million BITO shares changing hands.
According to analysts, this is one of the highest ever first day “natural” volume for an ETF on its opening day. It is second overall, closely behind the Blackrock US Carbon Transition Readiness ETF which booked $1.16 billion in volume on its debut in April.
BITO launched on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) yesterday with an opening price of $40.88. According to data from TradingView, BITO closed the day at $41.94, up approximately 2.60% for the day. Intraday, it traded as high as $42.15, with a total of 24.313 million shares changing hands, equating to a first-day volume of just over $1 billion.
What they are saying
Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, while commenting on the BITO’s opening day performance on Twitter, explained that BITO was arguably the largest in terms of “natural” or “grassroots interest.” He stated, “$BITO just about at $1b in total volume today (curr $993m but trades still trickling in). Easily the biggest Day One of any ETF in terms of ‘natural’ volume. It also traded more than 99.5% of all ETFs (incl some bigs like $DIA, $ARKK, $SLV). It def defied our expectations.”
He further said, “If we don’t exclude ETFs where their Day One volume was literally one pre-planned giant investor or BYOA (not natural), it still ranks #2 overall. Here’s that list. The reason some of these shouldn’t be included IMO is they don’t really represent grassroots interest.”
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Eric Balchunas further explained that Blackrock’s US Carbon Transition Readiness ETF (LCTU) April launch volume was “unnatural” as it was driven by “one pre-planned giant investor.” LCTU’s daily volume also fell off a cliff to between $2 million to $6 million in the days after launch.
Asides from this, CoinDesk reports that there were $570 million worth of inflows for BITO on the first day, suggesting that ProShares’ ETF could rank itself as an industry heavyweight in terms of year-one net flows for a first-to-market single commodity ETF in 12 months, stating that BITO’s assets, “shot to $570 million from $20 million on its first day of trading.”
Conclusion
The traction and inflow BITO is getting has sparked a rally in the underlining asset, Bitcoin. In the Asian session, Bitcoin traded as high as $64,434.53, nearly breaking its all time high of $64,863.10. It is currently below this all-time high by 1.77% and many analysts speculate that Bitcoin will trade an all-time high today.
Valkyrie’s Bitcoin futures-based ETF is set to be the second product to join BITO on the NYSE this week.