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- Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan told CNBC that he expects Bitcoin ETFs to continue exploding in 2025, noting that gold ETFs doubled their assets under management in the second year.
- Hougan also expects Ethereum ETFs to launch soon and to clinch at least a third of what Bitcoin ETFs have accumulated, based on their market cap, which would amount to over $15 billion.
Bitcoin ETFs have had an explosive debut, hitting $50 billion in assets under management just six months after launch. Matt Hougan, the CIO of crypto investment firm Bitwise, believes that 2025 will be even better, drawing parallels to gold ETFs whose AUM doubled in their second year.
Bitcoin ETFs launched in mid-January and already, they are the most successful ETFs ever. BlackRock’s iBIT has pooled $17.7 billion, while Fidelity’s FBTC has hit $10.6 billion. Ark and Bitwise have both hit $2 billion. Grayscale, whose GBTC trust converted into an ETF, has lost a sizeable amount of assets but still boasts the second-largest numbers at $15.63 billion.
But as Hougan told CNBC, it will get even better next year. “I think what you’re seeing is the birth of a new asset class,” he told the business news outlet.
He believes that Bitcoin ETFs’ are analogous to gold ETFs which launched in 2004. That year, they only brought in $1.5 billion, which was a respectable amount back then. However, the next year, this number doubled to $3 billion, and in 2006, they were doing $4 billion. Today, gold spot ETFs boast an industry-leading $233 billion, despite losing $6.7 billion year-to-date, which is their worst half since 2013.
That’s what I don’t think people realize about these Bitcoin ETFs. This was a huge first half, but I think the second half could be bigger, and then next year could be bigger than that.
The analogy between Bitcoin this year and gold in 2004 goes further as they are both niche commodities that investors struggled to access, Hougan added.
Nate Geraci, the President of the ETF Store, also joined the panel and concurred with just how successful Bitcoin ETFs’ debut has been this year.
300 new ETFs have come to market. The top four in terms of inflows, are all spot Bitcoin ETFs. I don’t think there’s any other way to categorize the first six months of spot Bitcoin ETFs’ existence as anything other than a monumental success.
The two were also optimistic that Ethereum ETFs will launch soon, and they say that they could attract nearly $20 billion in assets. Geraci says that since Ether accounts for about a third of BTC’s market cap, its ETFs should also attract at least a third of Bitcoin’s.
Ether ETFs are even more attractive to investors given Ethereum’s scope of applications. Bitcoin is purely regarded as a digital asset, but Ethereum’s network goes beyond tokens to underpinning applications like DeFi, DEXes, NFTs, identity, and more.
Hougan told CNBC:
If you want to invest in the growth of tokenization, Ethereum is like the picks and shovels play. It underpins all of it. I think it’s going to appeal to a lot of people.
The two tokens have each dipped by around 2%, dragging the entire industry’s market cap down 1.63%. They both risk dipping below critical support levels, with Bitcoin trading around $57,000 while Ethereum struggles to stay above $3,000 despite a boost from Donald Trump, as Crypto News Flash reported.
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