Bitcoin ETF followup

In early February, I wrote about the then 3-weeks-old Bitcoin ETFs in a post called Bitcoin ETFs and crazy number logic. I was trying to take a quick snapshot of what was happening and make a longshot guestimate of what might happen.

The main source I referenced was https://dune.com/hildobby/btc-etfs which shows aggregates of the ETFs.

I did some crazy math and graphic wizardry, with more artistic freedom than mathematical science, in attempt to figure some things out. The upshot is that I set a reminder to myself to check the EFT dashboard on May 18, 2024 to see how my math wizardry panned out. Well, it's May 18.

A few things stand out...

1. When looking at the original post, Grayscale's dominance was clear. GBTC held 73.6% of the Bitcoin ETF marketshare. This is not surprising as the others were only three weeks old. With Grayscales much higher fees, everyone expected their market share to drop. It had been for three weeks and has ever since.

2. GBTC's current market share (34.7%) is about to get flipped by Blackrock's (33.2%).

3. I did a crazy discussion of what I've called "The Shape" in attempt to predict where GBTC might bottom out. My prediction was that GBTC might level at well over 200,000 BTC. The crazy graph I drew showed at just over the 400,000 level. Well, GBTC currently holds 287,701 BTC. Missed that one for a mere 150,000 bitcoin!

4. I did more crazy figuring and drew a crazy graph for what today's graph might look like.

Below are the predicted and current graphs. Note that I took the liberty to stretch the current graph horizontally for comparison. That might be deceptive, but I wanted to visualize things.

Two things come to mind here.

First, I did pretty well on the proportions for each ETF. Slicing off the ends of the predicted and current graphs, I got this...

...which seems fairly accurate. I will note that Blackrock has gobbled up more of GBTC's share than I thought.

Secondly, I overestimated how much BTC would be in the ETFs. It looks like my graph shows the ETFs holding roughly double what they held when I first wrote. That would equate to about 1,500,000 BTC. In actuality, the ETFs currently hold 824,935 BTC. Well, chalk up my error to exuberance.

That's all. Nothing much else to say here. Mostly, I'd set a goal of writing a followup today and so I wanted to write a follow-up. I got some things sort of right, I totally missed some things. It's kind of like sports, on opening day, we all like making our predictions for how our team and others will do. We get some things right, we miss others. That's what makes it fun.
 

_{I go by @crrdlx or "CR" for short. See all my links or contact info at https://linktr.ee/crrdlx.}