VanEck’s Spot BTC ETF Witnesses a 14x Surge in Trading Volume

• VanEck’s BTC ETF, HODL, witnessed a 14-fold increase in trading volume on Tuesday.
• The surge shocked Eric Balchunas, a prominent analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. 
• WisdomTree’s BTC ETF, BTCW, also experienced a 12-fold surge in trading volume.

The trading volume of the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) offered by leading asset management firm VanEck (HODL), exploded on Tuesday, shocking senior Bloomberg ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas. 

As pointed out by Balchunas in a post on social media platform X, VanEck’s spot BTC ETF witnessed close to $250 million in volume by midday in New York. The analyst was shocked as this volume was reportedly 14 times the ETF’s daily average. 

It is important to note that the spike in trading volume was unlikely to be caused by one investor but around 32,000 individual trades in one day, which is 60 times the ETF’s average, noted Balchunas. A puzzled Balchunas was unable to explain the sudden surge in trading volume and added: 

Typically when the daily volume is greater than an ETF’s total assets (as in this case), it means one big creation, a la DYNF getting put in BLK models earlier this year. I’ve never seen a grassroots trading explosion come out of nowhere like this.

In another X post, Balchunas noted that the WisdomTree Bitcoin ETF (BTCW), witnessed a 12-fold increase in its trading volume ($154 million) as compared to its daily average volume. He highlighted the fact that BTCW saw just 221 trades on Friday and, on Tuesday, saw 23,000 individual trades.

Balchunas also addressed the people on X, calling for a crash in Bitcoin’s price, claiming that ETF holders are dumping their shares. 

He said that a crash makes “no sense” given how little the spot BTC ETFs that rallied had in existing assets under management. The analyst emphasized that “you never see tons of outflows in a brand new ETF that is in rally mode,” while adding that Bitcoin has a multitude of holders other than ETFs.