Bitcoin’s wild price swings point to the rising influence of ETF buyers
Bitcoin appears to be conforming more to the conventional viewpoints of traditional investors who have recently entered the digital asset world through the introduction of US exchange-traded funds.
The largest cryptocurrency surged Friday after a report showing a smaller-than-forecast increase in US employment renewed expectations for interest rate cuts, raising the appeal of speculative assets. The rally helped to erase most of the losses registered earlier in the week posted on growing concern Federal Reserve officials were becoming more hawkish and demand for the ETFs is ebbing.
“What this week has taught us is that Bitcoin at all-time-high and the new development of Bitcoin ETFs basically open Wall Street’s participation into the Bitcoin market in a way we’ve never seen before,” said Stéphane Ouellette, chief executive officer of FRNT Financial. “Before, there weren’t any obvious correlations with other asset classes, and it was very obvious that this week, particularly on the Tuesday night sell-off ahead of the Fed that Bitcoin was trading in line with other risk assets.”
Bitcoin jumped around 7% to $62,937 on Friday, helping to pull prices higher among smaller cryptocurrencies such as Ether, Solana and even memecoins like Dogecoin. Bitcoin had dropped to $56,527 on May 1, the lowest level in about two months.
Investors had pulled a net $564 million from the batch of almost a dozen US ETFs on Wednesday, the biggest drawdown since the products debuted in January. The prospect of higher-for-longer interest rates had also weighed on other market such as equities.
The drop in Bitcoin from the record of almost $74,000 reached in March showed some worry by traders who “may see some risk in the global macro environment that the Fed or general investors are not seeing yet,” said Youwei Yang, chief economist and vice president of crypto miner BIT Mining Ltd.
