Bitcoin stabilized after a sudden “perfect storm” sell-off over the past week that wiped $300 billion from the combined bitcoin and cryptocurrency market. The price of crypto remains near $60,000 per unit and is up about 50% since the beginning of the year, driven by a fleet of new spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on Wall Street.
Now, when the “ultimate goal” of X Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is about to cause chaos in the price of bitcoin, an executive at bitcoin spot ETF issuer BlackRock revealed that sovereign wealth funds are showing interest in bitcoin and could begin trading in the next months.
“Many of these interested companies—whether we’re talking about pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, other asset managers, family offices—are having ongoing diligence and research conversations, and we’re playing a role from an educational perspective.” , said Robert Mitchnick, head of Bitcoin and crypto at BlackRock, to Coindeskadding that BlackRock saw “a restart of the discussion around bitcoin.”
Sovereign wealth funds, such as those run by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are talking to BlackRock about bitcoin, as the price of bitcoin rebounded this year.
The interest in Bitcoin from sovereign funds such as the $1.6 trillion Norwegian fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia of 1 billion dollars and the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA)the world‘s oldest sovereign wealth fund, would represent a huge change in investment attitude towards bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
BlackRock “is meeting with wirehouses of large banks in the hope that they will give the go-ahead to recommend the Bitcoin ETF to clients in the coming months,” The Information claimed, citing anonymous sources. Currently, clients have to initiate conversations about spot Bitcoin ETFs with their advisors.
Last month, bitcoin ETF issuer Bitwise’s chief investment officer, Matt Hougan, predicted that the release of bitcoin ETFs to retail investors, hedge funds and independent financial advisors would trigger an “even bigger” surge than ETF approvals. in January.
Last month, speculation about the identity of a mysterious Bitcoin buyer sparked wild theories that the country of Qatar had started buying Bitcoin, with Max Keiser, a flamboyant Bitcoin investor, working with El Salvador on its Bitcoin strategy. , stating last year without providing evidence that Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund “rumored to be looking to buy 500 billion Bitcoin.”
The price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in the last year.
The arrival of the long-awaited bitcoin spot ETFs on Wall Street this year has already elevated bitcoin to a new cohort of investors who previously considered it an unproven store of value.
The largest of the new funds, BlackRock’s IBIT, has accumulated $17 billion in assets under management in the three months since its debut, recently notching a 71-day streak of inflows.
Last week, Morgan Stanley may soon give the green light to its 15,000 brokers to recommend Bitcoin spot ETFs to their clients, AdvisorHub reported citing anonymous sources.
With information from Forbes US