Reported by Coindesk, don't be fooled by the first break in inflows into spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) after 71 straight days. The current lull is likely to be followed by a new wave from a different type of investor, said Robert Mitchnick, head of digital assets for BlackRock, the world's largest asset-management company.
The coming months could see financial institutions such as sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and endowments start to trade in the spot ETFs, Mitchnick said in an interview. The firm is seeing “a re-initiation of the discussion around bitcoin,” which turns on the topic of allocating to bitcoin (BTC) and how to think about it from a portfolio construction perspective.
“Many of these interested firms – whether we're talking about pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, other asset managers, family offices – are having ongoing diligence and research conversations, and we're playing a role from an education perspective,” Mitchnick said. And the interest is not new: BlackRock has been talking about bitcoin to these sorts of institutions for several years, he said.
Pent-up demand for the much-anticipated ETFs has seen more than $76 billion accumulated across these products since their approval in January. So far, some registered investment advisors (RIAs), a decent-sized subset of wealth advisory, are already offering BlackRock’s IBIT ETF, but only on an unsolicited basis. The next step is expected to be the unrestricted offering of bitcoin ETFs to clients of large wealth advisory players like Morgan Stanley.
Bitcoin
