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The bitcoin price has rebounded to its all-time highs of around $70,000 per bitcoin with the ethereum price coming to within touching distance of $4,000 per ether this week after the shock ethereum ETF approval created an "opportune moment" for bitcoin.
Now, as China quietly lays the ground work for a Hong Kong bitcoin and ethereum ETF boom of its own, BlackRock's
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Forbes'Crucial' Biden And Fed Flip Predicted To Trigger A $20 Trillion Bitcoin Price Earthquake That Boosts Ethereum, XRP And CryptoBy Billy Bambrough
"For our clients, their interest overwhelmingly has been in bitcoin a little bit in ethereum and not a whole lot in that longer tale of 10,000-plus assets so I think it's important to make that distinction between the two," Robert Mitchnick, head of crypto at BlackRock, told Bloomberg ahead of the Wall Street ethereum ETF being approved this week.
BlackRock's IBIT spot bitcoin ETF has pulled in almost $16 billion since January, topping the other recently approved bitcoin ETFs and becoming one of the fastest growing ETFs of all time.
"I can't overstate how powerfully attractive that is to every investor," Mitchnick said. "I'm we're probably going to see people come over from other countries who are big investors just to get that it's just hard to compete with that."
Speculation has ramped up following the suprise ethereum ETF approval that Ripple's XRP
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ForbesBiden's 'Seismic Shift' Could Be About To Trigger A Huge Bitcoin Price Earthquake After Ethereum 'Firestorm'By Billy Bambrough
"Certainly there's some great projects out there in that larger group of assets but there's also been a lot of pretty frivolous projects," Mitchnick, who worked at XRP developer Ripple in 2017, said, adding it's "still early."
"A lot of tokens that have been flash in the pan and they've come and gone and there's been you know hype associated with them that hasn't been backed up by real economic substance so it's going to be a long journey for some of the rest of crypto to really start establishing product market fit and economic use cases before they start to I think cross that chasm into what we've seen obviously bitcoin become."
This week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) took traders and the crypto industry off guard when it green-lit a number of ethereum ETFs, expected to begin trading over the next few months. It's thought the SEC's unexpected approval could have been the result of political pressure as crypto takes center stage in the looming 2024 U.S. presidential race.
"For other coins [such as] solana [and] XRP) markets will look ahead to their eventual ETF status as well, albeit this is likely a 2025 story not a 2024 one," Geoffrey Kendrick, head of crypto at Standard Chartered, said in an emailed note. "So for me, for now, bitcoin and ethereum dominance will rise with selective 'next in line' winners as well."