Cryptocurrency market intelligence tool Arkham Intelligence believes that if the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust's redemption rate continues at its current pace, the fund will run out of bitcoins within the next 96 days.
The Bitcoin holdings of Grayscale Investments' exchange-traded fund, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBT), which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in January, could be depleted in just 14 weeks, according to estimates from the Arkham Intelligence platform.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Arkham Intelligence highlighted that in just two months, GBTC has seen outflows of over 266.470 BTC. According to the platform, this means that the exchange-traded fund has had an average redemption rate of 25.900 BTC per week. If it continues at this rate, its Bitcoin reserves could be completely depleted in the next three months, the platform noted.
GBTC, one of the pioneering Bitcoin investment funds, now holds only 355.750 BTC, out of over 618.280 BTC it held when it first went public. This amount of Bitcoin is valued at around $23.800 billion USD, at the time of writing.
The ongoing struggle of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust
Large outflows from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust were accentuated last week, driven by Genesis Global Capital's operations, several analysts noted. The cryptocurrency lending company began selling GBTC shares as part of its bankruptcy process, accelerating bitcoin outflows from the fund and affecting the cryptocurrency's market price, which was quoted last Wednesday near $60.000.
Bloomberg Intelligence's Eric Balchunas said The ETF analyst said the platform's bankruptcy had had a strong impact on the market, due to its size and consistency. However, the ETF analyst also believes that, although Genesis' sales operations accelerated GBTC outflows last week, the worst may have already happened or is about to happen for this Grayscale Investments exchange-traded fund, so the pace of outflows should slow down this week.
Like Balchunas, Vetle Lunde, senior analyst at K33 Research, also believes that Grayscale Bitcoin outflows should be able to slow down in the coming days.
A week of record departures
Overall, new Bitcoin spot ETFs listed on the US market have seen a record week of outflows, with a total of 5 consecutive days of negative flows, at the time of writing. According to the data, fund inflows remained negative over the past week, with only BlackRock and Fidelity spot ETFs seeing minor inflows.
According to the data, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and Fidelity Investments’ Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) saw inflows of $18,9 million and $2,9 million, respectively. These inflows are quite weak compared to previous records.
However, in a separate post on X, Balchunas highlighted that the real record of Bitcoin ETFs is that IBIT and FBTC have managed to register 49 consecutive days of entries since they began trading on the market. According to the analyst, this is a milestone that only 30 ETFs have been able to achieve, but none of them had been able to do it from the beginning.
Bitcoin ETFs have been taking center stage in the market since they were approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last January.
There are almost 240.000 bitcoins in BlackRock's IBIT
At the time of writing, BlackRock's spot ETF is close to reaching 240.000 bitcoins in reserveThe exchange-traded fund holds more than $16.000 billion in Bitcoin and, according to Balchunas, accounts for more than half of BlackRock's net inflows so far this year.
The amount of bitcoins currently held by BlackRock's exchange-traded fund represents more than 65% of the amount of bitcoins held in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.
Continue reading: Japan Government Pension Investment Fund Considers Expanding Operations to Bitcoin
