CoinSpotMarket Update
Bitcoin Hits One-Month High & First Major Bank Launches Bitcoin ETF
7 minutes
5 days ago
7 minutes
5 days ago
Bitcoin (BTC) started the week with a rising past $106,000, its highest price since March 17. It comes as BTC is on track to record three straight weekly gains for the first time since July, a sign that demand is returning for the largest cryptocurrency in the market.
The recent performance of Ethereum (ETH) is also worth highlighting. This week, the ETH/BTC trading pair hit 0.032, its highest value since January. This means that 1 ETH buys 0.032 BTC.
The ETH/BTC pair, which measures ETH’s performance relative to BTC, has historically been closely watched to assess the overall health of the altcoin market. When the ETH/BTC ratio goes up, it means ETH is outperforming BTC, which often translates into other altcoins outperforming BTC.
Morgan Stanley, one of the world’s largest investment banks, officially launched its spot Bitcoin ETF, making it the first major U.S. bank to do so. The ETF, called the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), has the lowest fees on the market, at just 0.14% per year.
According to the bank’s head of digital assets, Amy Oldenburg, MSBT posted the best first trading day of any Morgan Stanley ETF to date. In an interview, she noted that the launch of MSBT marked the first in “long roadmap of new products” in the digital asset space.
Morgan Stanley oversees a network of approximately 16,000 advisors who manage trillions of dollars in client assets. Notably, its Bitcoin ETF is just the third ETF to carry the ‘Morgan Stanley’ name. Generally speaking, more demand for spot ETFs like MSBT equates to more demand for BTC overall.
Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, continues to accumulate large amounts of BTC, this week announcing that it bought another 13,927 BTC for approximately $1.6 billion ($1 billion USD) during the week ending April 12.
Already the largest corporate holder of BTC by some margin, Strategy now holds 780,897 BTC in total, which is roughly 3.72% of the 21 million coins that will ever exist.
Strategy’s latest purchase was funded primarily by STRC, one of the company’s various offerings. In recent months, this has been Strategy’s main way of acquiring more BTC, as opposed to when it used to sell common shares of MSTR. It is widely anticipated that Strategy is acquiring more BTC this week using this same mechanism.
While Strategy was accumulating BTC during the previous bear market of 2022, back when the company was called MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor was the CEO, the amounts were a fraction of what has already been accumulated in this bear market over recent months.
Strategy has already purchased significantly more BTC than the previous bear market (Source: Strategy)
Foundry Digital, the company which operates the largest Bitcoin mining pool, launched a dedicated Zcash (ZEC) mining pool that targets institutional miners. Within its first month, the pool captured roughly 29% of the total Zcash network hashrate, a measure of the combined computing power used to secure a network.
Before Foundry's entry, a single pool called ViaBTC controlled around 68% of the Zcash network's hashrate. That figure has since dropped to approximately 37%.
When one pool controls a large share of a network's hashrate, it has the potential to exert significant influence over how transactions are processed, which is considered a centralisation risk. Foundry's entry has reduced that concentration, strengthening the security and resilience of the Zcash network.
"I'm happy that Foundry is bringing their institutional credibility and long-term commitment to Zcash," said Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox, who commented on Foundry’s expansion.
Foundry (green line) has already captured roughly 29% of Zcash’s total hashrate, bringing competition that should help network resilience (Source: Zcash Info)
