April has proved to be a tough month for the spot bitcoin ETFs. Or at least the toughest month they've faced so far; on the whole the new ETFs still remain largely successful.
For starters, we started to see outflows from the new funds. While previously, Grayscale, the trust-converted fund, was the driver of the capital flight from the ETFs, we started to see funds come out of the freshly launched ETFs, as well.
On April 2, we saw $87.5 million pulled from Ark Invest and 21Shares' ARKB, which is the third largest of the new ETFs by AUM. The ETF saw outflows on April 16-17 and April 25, as well.
Bitwise's BITB also had two days of outflows this month, but they only totaled to $13.3 million, so overall, very mild relative to the inflows it has had.
The most jarring, perhaps, was Fidelity's FBTC seeing $22.6 million of outflows on April 25. Again, while this is largely insignificant in the grand scheme of things for the ETF, it does seem to mark a changing tide of sentiment.
And BlackRock's IBIT, the most successful of the new ETFs, has still not seen daily outflows yet but did clock in $0 worth of flows on April 24, bringing its 71-day inflow streak to an end. Its 70 days of consecutive inflows brought the ETF into the top 10 of funds with the longest streaks of money pouring in.
Is it all over for the ETFs now? No, of course not.
IBIT still tops the charts across ETFs in terms of AUM after 72 days, at $17.6 billion, despite the cut off in inflows. FBTC is second on the list, and ARKB and BITB are both in the top 10. So even though all four of these funds have seen inflows slow down and, in some cases, have seen outflows, they have still largely managed to amass historically sizable levels of capital in their first few months on the market.
The two popular ETF analysts at Bloomberg, James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas, have both been vocal online about the fact that this trend is normal. Seyffart wrote a thread about the commonality of ETFs tracking no flows, and when many expressed panic when ARKB first showed outflows, they clarified that outflows are also typical in mature ETFs, but the crazy success of the ETFs in the early days made it look abnormal.
Part of what could be causing the slowdown in flows is the more tepid bitcoin market in general. Bitcoin's 30-day annualized volatility has fallen below 50% this month, which is still quite high but lower than the 81% reached in late March after bitcoin climbed to new highs. The flows and volumes of the new ETFs surged along with the price of bitcoin. There is less fervor in the bitcoin market itself, which has translated over into ETF activity.
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