More bitcoin (BTC) has been amassed by the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) in its less than two-month existence than by MicroStrategy (MSTR).IBIT had 195,985 bitcoin on Friday following another day of strong inflows, per the fund’s most recent declaration.As of February 26, 193,000 tokens were held by the corporation, according to MicroStrategy’s latest public announcements.
Given that MicroStrategy priced a $700 million capital round earlier this week with plans to utilize the proceeds to buy more bitcoin, it’s plausible that the company has increased that sum since then.With the exception of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which was converted from a closed-end fund, BlackRock’s IBIT has consistently added hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin every day since the spot ETFs launched on January 11. This has made it the largest new spot product.
The next cryptocurrency in line for IBIT would be Grayscale’s GBTC, which currently possesses about 400,000 tokens despite having lost almost 200,000 bitcoin since the spot products’ launch.
The main driver of bitcoin’s more than 60% price increase this year has been the enormous demand for the new spot ETFs.According to statistics from CoinDesk Indices, the cryptocurrency crossed $70,000 for the first time ever on Friday morning and ultimately hit a new all-time high of $70,136.Bitcoin was trading at just less than $70,000 at the time of publication.