The SEC can finally approved spot bitcoin ETFs on Wednesday after denying applications for more than a decade.
Valkyrie Co-founder and CIO Steven McClurg expects $10 billion or more to flow into spot bitcoin ETFs by the end of the year, with about $2 billion to $3 billion in the first expected week of trading. “This doesn’t just take market movements into account,” he said. “These are new inflows that I expect. Accounting for market movements, the total AUM in spot bitcoin ETFs could be $20 billion.” Valkyrie is one of 11 candidates for a US spot bitcoin ETF. The other companies include BlackRock, Grayscale and Fidelity.
He also believes that the price of bitcoin will reach $150,000 or higher before the end of 2024. “In terms of price, I think there will be a supply shock that will move [the] honor forward,” McClurg said. “The ETF creates a lack of supply, so buying activity. After the by halfI expect we’ll be back in a bullish cycle and from a macro perspective I think the Fed will cut rates again in May/June ahead of the election, which will cause excess risk to increase.”
We sat down with McClurg to discuss the impending demand for bitcoin spot ETFs, why he thinks bitcoin futures ETFs will disappear, which crypto spot ETFs could be next, and why fee wars are “ridiculous.”
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you know the SEC might actually approve a spot bitcoin ETF?
We’ve been running hard for the last probably six weeks now on it, and it’s been pretty exciting. But it was back in late September, early October when we launched the ETH futures ETF. Just as we were getting ready to launch, we got feedback from the Securities and Exchange Commission about our on-site bitcoin app and we thought, “Well this came out of nowhere.” And once we got that feedback, we realized, okay, they’re taking a look at it now. They wanted to get these future products behind them, and now let’s focus on that.
So I and others are very confident that Wednesday will be approved after the market with a release on Thursday for trading.
How did your September ETH ETF launch go?
So what we did was a little different. When we had a inclination that [the] The spot bitcoin ETF would be coming soon, we said OK, so the bitcoin futures ETF will basically disappear when a spot bitcoin ETF comes out.
So we turned our bitcoin futures ETF into an investment strategy in both ETH and bitcoin. This is actively managed so that we can link the market in these two asset classes, which is actually the easiest thing to do in futures. And even if there was an ETH point available, then we could do a bitcoin ETF.
