The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO), a futures-based Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, has seen its assets under management surge over the last few weeks to top the $2 billion mark ahead of the approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States.
According to YCharts data, BITO’s assets under management are currently sitting at $2.187 billion, surging by more than $180 million after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs from major issuers, including BlackRock, Fidelity, and Invesco.
The approved spot ETFs will now trade on exchanges like stocks and enjoy special tax benefits in the United States. Proponents believe that they’re going to allow institutional and retail Us investors to more easily gain exposure to BTC, as they won’t have to go through centralized cryptocurrency exchanges and won’t have to manage their own private keys.
BITO was the first Bitcoin futures ETF launched in the United States, back in 2021, and in the absence of an ETF investing directly in the flagship cryptocurrency its popularity soared amid investors looking to gain exposure to Bitcoin.
The fund’s assets under management initially soared to surpass $1 billion, but in November 2022 amid the collapse of FTX its AUM plunged to around $500 million, before it started recovering.
Notably amid growing expectations surrounding the now-confirmed launch of a spot Bitcoin ETF, the largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency MicroStrategy kept on accumulating to now sit on over $500 million of unrealized gains so far this year.
The firm holds 189,150 BTC currently worth around $8.87 billion, but that cot the company around $5.895 billion to acquire after the company first started accumulating the cryptocurrency back in August 2020.
When the Nasdaq-listed business intelligence firm first started accumulating Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency was trading just above the $10,000 mark. MicroStrategy then bought 21,454 BTC as it entered the space, and has been investing in Bitcoin since to now have an average investment cost per BTC of around $31,165.
As CryptoGlobe reported, the firm recently added an additional 14,620 BTC to its stash for around $615.7 million, at an average price of $42,110 per coin to hold around 0.9% of the flagship cryptocurrency’s total supply.
Featured image via Pixabay.
