Cathie Wood’s ARK Bitcoin ETF has record $87M outflow, surpassing GBTC

Cathie Wood's ARK 21 Shares Bitcoin (BTC $66,206) exchange-traded fund (ETF) has notched more than $87 million in daily outflows, marking the first time the fund has witnessed a larger daily outflow than Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) since the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States. 

The outflow from Ark 21Shares fu (ARKB) was $87.5 million on April 2 — roughly 1,300 BTC — according to preliminary data from Farside Investors.

Today marked the second consecutive day of outflows for ARKB which lost $300,000 in assets on its first-ever day of outflows on April 1.

Grayscale — which has posted consistent outflows every trading day since converting to a spot ETF — posted yet another daily outflow of $81.9 million.

Bitcoin ETF flows USD. Source: Farside Investors

Notably, this was a relatively low outflow day for GBTC which has shed an average of $254 million per day over the past five trading days. Grayscale has hemorrhaged around $15.1 billion in total over the past three months. 

A $150.5 million inflow for BlackRock's fund resulted in a net aggregate inflow of $40.3 million for the day despite the outflows from ARKB and GBTC. 

Despite the past two days of outflows, ARKB still stands as the third largest of the ten newly launched spot ETFs — excluding Grayscale — boasting $2.2 billion in assets under management (AUM).

ARKB trails behind BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s funds which command respective AUM’s of $14.1 billion and $7.6 billion.

ARKB is also the sixth largest holder of BTC among funds, corporations, and miners, currently holding a total of 44,662 BTC on its books, according to data from HODL15Capital.

Source: HODL15Capital

Despite shedding a staggering 291,000 Bitcoin since its conversion to an ETF, GBTC still leads the pack in terms of total Bitcoin held, with around 329,000 Bitcoin on its books at the time of publication.

The price of Bitcoin has been on the decline since the beginning of this month, falling around 9% from last week's high of $71,500 and briefly dipping below $65,000 on April 3 amid increasing ETF outflows.

In an April 2 post to X, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted the launch of the first-ever 2x and -2x leveraged spot Bitcoin ETFs. The ProShares-based funds trade under the tickers BITU and SBIT.

“Looks like these two ETFs will be in the top 5 most volatile ETFs in the US (out of 3,400) with a standard deviation of about 150%,” he added.

Source: Eric Balchunas

Balchunas also noted that Bitcoin ETFs traded around $111 billion in volume in March, nearly triple what they did in February and January combined.