On Friday, December 27, there was a record outflow from Fidelity’s ETF on BTC (FBTC).
Note that FBTC is now the third largest Bitcoin ETF in the world, also close to surpassing GBTC by Grayscale and becoming the second.
The outflows from BTC ETFs: record for Fidelity
Last Friday, there were a total of nearly 288 million dollars in outflows from Bitcoin ETFs.
Of these, a total of 208 million have exited from FBTC.
This is essentially a record outflow, only slightly lower than the 208.5 million outflow from FBTC on December 19.
Also on Friday, there were net outflows of 112 million dollars from ARKB, the ARK Invest ETF on Bitcoin, while the largest ETF on BTC in the world, BlackRock’s IBIT, recorded net inflows of over 79 million.
Note that the previous day there had been total inflows of over 450 million dollars, but on Tuesday 24 there had been outflows of more than 338 million.
Until December 18, a series of several consecutive days of net total outflows had been recorded, with a peak on December 16 of 367 million dollars.
Instead, starting from December 19, a negative series began with the sole exception of Thursday the 26th.
The price of Bitcoin
In fact, until December 17, there had been a rise in the price of BTC to new all-time highs above $108,000, while starting from Wednesday, December 18, with the press conference of the Fed chairman Jerome Powell, a phase of decline began.
It should be noted that net total inflows or outflows on ETFs on Bitcoin spot are followed by purchases or sales of BTC on the market, respectively. Although these do not occur on exchanges, but via OTC, they inevitably have an impact on demand and supply on exchanges, albeit indirectly.
To tell the truth, however, the daily overall inflows or outflows of ETFs are still made up of relatively small figures, compared to the trading volumes on the exchanges.
For example, on December 19, when the overall net outflows exceeded 670 million dollars, the daily trading volume of the BTC-USDT spot trading pair on Binance alone was over 5.3 billion dollars.
Despite the comparison being harsh, the sales of ETFs can still have an impact on the price, although probably still minimal.
In fact, in the face of five days of multimillion outflows, although not consecutive, the price of BTC has fallen by 11%, so these two dynamics do indeed seem correlated.
The ETF by Fidelity on BTC
FBTC debuted on the CBOE on January 11 of this year, along with the other U.S. spot BTC ETFs.
CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) is a stock exchange located in Chicago, and it is the largest U.S. exchange for options trading.
Instead, the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) is the other stock exchange in Chicago, but it is specialized in futures.
FBTC as of today holds more than 204,000 BTC, compared to 553,000 for IBIT and 207,000 for GBTC.
It should be noted, however, that the growth of FBTC occurred mainly in the first months of the year, when it went from 0 to 143,000 BTC in just over two months.
After the price of Bitcoin retraced in March, once the new all-time highs of that time were recorded, the growth of FBTC slowed down considerably. In fact, in the following four months, it increased its BTC by less than 40,000 units.
Furthermore, until October from this point of view it did not grow anymore, and between November and the first half of December it only rose from 180,000 to 207,000 BTC, then fell back to 204,000 in the last days.
For example, IBIT by BlackRock, on the other hand, in the last two months has experienced a real boom, going from 380,000 BTC at the end of October to the current 553,000. It should also be noted that GBTC in the last two months has gone from 220,000 to 207,000 BTC.
The Bitcoin ETFs
Overall, the Bitcoin held by ETFs, including those of GBTC which debuted on January 11 with already more than 600,000 BTC in its portfolio, have grown especially at the beginning of the year, and in the last two months.
After the landing on the USA stock exchanges, they went from 771,000 BTC to 1,011,000 in less than two months, then remained consistently below 1,100,000 until the end of October.
In the last two months, however, they have gone from 1,119,000 BTC to the current 1,294,000.
It was therefore a success concentrated in two individual moments, the first of which was generated precisely by their landing on the bull and bear markets in the United States.
Note that in both cases the price of Bitcoin has grown significantly, but in light of this data, it is possible to imagine that the impact of the growth of ETFs on BTC spot on the price of Bitcoin has been limited.
