Global ETF issuers hold 793,000 Bitcoins, and Grayscale GBTC accounts for nearly 80%, hiding "huge selling pressure"?

 
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently reviewing Bitcoin spot ETF applications submitted by 13 issuers such as BlackRock and Grayscale. The market also generally believes that we will usher in early January 2024. The first Bitcoin spot ETF has made Bitcoin a mainstream investment target for traditional financial institutions.
Grayscale holdings account for 3% of total BitcoinIn this context, the cryptocurrency data platform CoinGecko recently released a research report and compiled that currently listed Bitcoin-related ETFs (futures/spots) around the world hold a total of approximately 793,034 Bitcoins (approximately US$34 billion). Accounting for 3.8% of the total Bitcoin supply (21 million coins).
Among them, Grayscale, which is currently working hard to apply to convert its Bitcoin trust fund GBTC into a Bitcoin spot ETF, owns 622,657 Bitcoins, which is far more than MicroStrategy, the dominant Bitcoin holding among US listed companies. , nearly 4 times the total holdings of other Bitcoin-related ETFs.
Will Grayscale's GBTC conversion to spot ETF release a large amount of BTC selling pressure?We know that Grayscale’s GBTC can currently only be bought and sold in specific secondary markets. If the transformation is successful in the future, spot BTC can be freely traded. Although it provides convenience to investors, it also means that there are more than 62 Tens of thousands of BTC will release liquidity, which is hard to guarantee that it will not bring huge selling pressure to the current Bitcoin price.
JP Morgan analysts also stated in a report at the end of November that since the beginning of this year, the net cumulative inflow into GBTC has reached approximately US$2.5 billion. If the short covering since the beginning of the year is included, the selling pressure may reach US$2.7 billion.
At the same time, CoinGecko also pointed out in the report that currently the global Bitcoin-related ETF issuers only control a very small number of Bitcoin spot. Even if the Bitcoin spot ETF is approved in the future, it remains to be seen whether it will have a huge impact on the price of Bitcoin.
Top 20 Bitcoin ETFs by asset sizeAccording to CoinGecko statistics, as of December 22, 2023, the total capital size of the top 20 Bitcoin ETFs in the world is less than US$20 billion, with the largest being Sweden’s XBT Provider Bitcoin Tracker One ( COINXBT), with a capital size of US$7.11 billion, but the second-placed ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) has a capital scale of only US$1.63 billion, which is far behind COINXBT, and the last-placed ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITI) is even less , only $54.86 million.
SEC says “approval is expected in January”Returning to the latest developments in Bitcoin spot ETFs, Reuters reported over the weekend, citing people familiar with the matter, that SEC officials met last Thursday with representatives of at least 7 issuers who hope to launch such ETFs in early 2024, and told at least 2 companies that they need to The application documents for final changes were submitted before the 29th, making the market expect that the probability that the SEC will pass spot ETFs in mid-January has once again increased.
However, it is worth noting that two company executives who met with the SEC said that the SEC also informed the meeting that any issuer that cannot complete the changes before the deadline will not become the first batch of potentially approved Bitcoin spot in early January. ETF.