Trope N’ Cope: A Post Mortem on the Bitcoin ETF Launches

TL;DR

• Despite the BTC ETFs attracting billions of early investment, it was met with $1B+ of selling pressure, which has depressed BTC’s price.

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Today we’re doing a post mortem on the Bitcoin ETF launches, in a new format that we’re calling:

Trope n’ Cope.

Copium, aka ‘cope,’ is what you tell yourself to cope with bad news.

E.g. Trope: “Ethereum’s fees are too high.” Cope: “Well Ethereum layer 2’s are an affordable alternative...”

(It’ll make more sense as we go along).

Trope: These Bitcoin ETFs were meant to attract billions of dollars of investment and push the price up…but the price cratered.

Cope: The crazy part is, they did attract billions of investment! Record breaking amounts in fact.

It’s just that when Grayscale converted its Bitcoin ‘trust’ (which already had tens of billions of investment) into an ETF, the firm didn’t lower its fees to compete with other offerings.

As a result, a bunch of folks that invested in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, sold ~$1.1B worth of shares, once trust turned into an ETF (so they could park their money in a lower fee ETF).

And even then, the amount of money flowing into the ETFs within the first three days of launch was still net positive (+$588M).

Trope: The weak price performance of Bitcoin, post ETF launches, proves that traditional investors aren’t interested in crypto.

Cope: Maybe…but the traditional financial system moves at a much slower pace than crypto.

All these big investment advisors need to go and float the idea of Bitcoin ETFs to their clients, explain what BTC even is, and wait for a green light.

It’s gonna take a minute for everyone to get onboard and allocate.

(That, or it could all go to hell in a hand basket…but that’s the game we play).