In brief
- U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in around $2.3 billion from September 8 to 12.
- BlackRock’s IBIT and Fidelity’s FBTC captured the bulk of flows, with other issuers posting smaller gains.
- Observers said the surge reflects structural demand from institutions, with inflows expected to scale further.
U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds pulled in roughly $2.3 billion last week, marking the highest weekly inflows since mid-July.
The streak ran across all five trading sessions from September 8 to September 12, according to aggregated data from Farside and SoSoValue. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust led with just over $1 billion of inflows, while Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund brought in nearly $850 million. Other issuers, including Ark Invest and Bitwise, also posted gains, though smaller.
Daily flows showed steady demand. Monday started with $364 million, followed by a muted $23 million on Tuesday. The pace accelerated to $742 million on Wednesday, $553 million on Thursday, and $642 million on Friday.
Last week’s inflows “signal clear demand impulse, the one that looks both meaningful and timely,” Georgii Verbitskii, a derivatives trader and founder of decentralized protocol TYMIO, told Decrypt.
With September to October marking “the start of the business season,” Verbitskii notes that the this “often sets the tone for trends that play out through the end of the year.” The base case, he added, is that this could be “the beginning of a new uptrend, with strong potential for further growth into Q4.”
Still, while the inflows show a marked return to mid-July levels, “the number itself isn’t transformative on its own,” Wesley Crook, CEO of blockchain engineering firm FP Block, told Decrypt.
“Much of this activity is being driven by expectations of rate cuts alongside the broader trend of enterprises entering the market,” Crook said, adding that he expects the momentum to likely continue as institutional allocations for Bitcoin bring “upward pressure on prices.”
Pre-Fed surge
The surge aligned with growing expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will cut rates at its next meeting set this week, with users of prediction market Myriad, launched by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN, placing an 88% chance on a 25bps rate cut.
During the same period, Bitcoin’s price recovered above $115,000, reinforcing investor optimism. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is changing hands at around $114,600, per CoinGecko data.
“Structural demand is the real story here,” Farbod Sadeghian, founder of Dubai-headquartered international virtual asset chamber TheBlock., told Decrypt.
While rate cut expectations could provide “a friendlier backdrop for risk assets,” such a setting is temporary, Sadeghian said.
“The bigger factor is that investors, especially at the institutional level, now see Bitcoin as an allocation worth holding over the long term,” he said, adding that “the ETF wrapper makes it easier and safer to access, but the underlying appetite is clearly about exposure to the asset itself.”
On the broader end, Sadeghian notes that Bitcoin ETF inflows, while “never perfectly smooth,” could expect to “stabilize and scale further” over macro-driven momentum as institutional investors steadily “integrate Bitcoin ETFs into standard portfolios.”
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