Bitcoin ETFs Will Soon Hold 1M Tokens, Nearly as Much as Satoshi

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The holdings of the U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds are about to cross over one million tokens after only ten months of trading.
Fueled most recently by major inflows into the funds as bitcoin (BTC) rallies into the election, the ETFs, which only opened for business on Jan. 11 of this year, currently hold roughly 967,459 tokens. With just a modest continuation of inflows, they are likely to cross the one million mark in the next couple of weeks, bringing them into the territory of Satoshi Nakamoto, who owns 1.1 million tokens, per Blockchain.com data.
The second depository of bitcoin is Binance, which held 636,000 BTC as of Oct. 1, as laid out in its Proof of Reserves. It’s likely that most of those holdings are not for the exchange’s own account, but instead owned by its customers.
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) currently holds 396,922 BTC on behalf of clients, putting the asset management giant in third place.
Interest in the ETFs – which had waned alongside months of sideways-to-lower price action – has picked up along with bitcion, which at press time was trading close to a three-month high just shy of $68,000. Last week, the funds saw their biggest single-day inflows since early June, taking in over $555 million on Oct. 14, according to data from Farside Investors. The total amount of assets added to the funds last week was $2.1 billion, the strongest amount since March.
The largest cryptocurrency by market cap has been rallying over the last two weeks as a result of several factors, possibly among them are the apparent boosted odds of crypto-friendly Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential election in November.
Read more: Trump’s Lead Over Harris Widens on Polymarket’s Prediction Market
Edited by Stephen Alpher.
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Helene is a New York-based reporter covering Wall Street, the rise of the spot bitcoin ETFs and crypto exchanges. She is also the co-host of CoinDesk’s Markets Daily show. Helene is a graduate of New York University’s business and economic reporting program and has appeared on CBS News, YahooFinance and Nasdaq TradeTalks. She holds BTC and ETH.