After less than a year of trading on Wall Street, U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are well on pace to surpass the estimated BTC stack of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of the flagship cryptocurrency.
Should this accumulation trend continue, the Bitcoin ETFs may collectively hold more Bitcoin than Satoshi by as early as this Christmas.
Bitcoin ETFs Less Than 200,000 BTC Away From Topping Satoshi’s Holdings
In a recent post on X, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas observed that the nearly a dozen spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds now trading on American stock exchanges have amassed an astounding $17.8 billion in inflows in 2024 — representing a record-breaking year-to-date accumulation of 916,047 BTC. That is just about 84,000 BTC away from the coveted 1,000,000 BTC milestone.
The ETFs are closing in on Nakamoto’s estimated 1.1 million BTC stash, which the world’s most elusive man mined in the infancy of Bitcoin and hasn’t touched after disappearing more than 13 years ago.
And the spot Bitcoin ETFs now aren’t far behind. The January launch of the Bitcoin ETFs was one of the most successful ETF launches in history. Billions of dollars have hit the funds as investors previously scared off from crypto investing finally got a safe and regulated way to buy Bitcoin.
The top three ETFs from BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale have accumulated 359,271 BTC, 287,153 BTC, and 254,677 BTC, respectively. In total, all the BTC ETFs need to load up on roughly 183,953 BTC to surpass Satoshi’s believed tally.
If these funds continue increasing their Bitcoin reserves at the same rate, they could overtake Satoshi’s stockpile and kick him off the top.
US bitcoin ETFs had good day yesterday pushing YTD flows to new high water mark of $17.8b. They’re now 92% of the way to owning 1million bitcoin and 83% of way to passing Satoshi as top holder. Tick tock.. pic.twitter.com/kTxlIzjJy6
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) September 25, 2024
Tolou Capital Management founder Spencer Hakimian shared Balchunas’s sentiment, predicting that “ETFs are going to be bigger than Satoshi by Christmas”, to which the Bloomberg pundit agreed, adding that BlackRock’s ETF alone will at some point top the list of Bitcoin holders.
Meanwhile, a top crypto market analyst has recently posited that the fast-rising concentration of Bitcoin by spot ETFs is the main reason the United States is “regaining dominance in Bitcoin holdings,” compared to the rest of the world.
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