Ten31 Timestamp early leak
After months of hype and several highly entertaining false starts, the SEC finally approved 11 spot bitcoin ETFs on Wednesday of this week – exactly 15 years after Hal Finney’s iconic “running bitcoin” tweet – with trading commencing the following day. While the dust has yet to settle on exactly how early flows will shake out and the market’s hysterics leading up to the approval were undoubtedly a sideshow, we do expect these vehicles will make it easier for traditional pools of capital to flow into bitcoin, with positive implications for bitcoin’s price over time. More importantly, though, these ETFs represent the latest piece of clear evidence of Ten31’s thesis that bitcoin is eating the world. After years of deriding bitcoin as not just uninteresting but even outright harmful, the leaders of the legacy financial system just spent the last several weeks in a sprint to not only secure approval for their bitcoin ETFs but also to outdo each other in extolling bitcoin’s unique virtues on mainstream news appearances. Most notably, Larry Fink, who just a few years ago called bitcoin an “index of money laundering,” took to multiple broadcasts to promote bitcoin as an “asset that protects you.”
While Larry clearly still doesn’t fully get it, this diametric shift in tone is emblematic of the fact that, sooner or later, every self-interested economic actor will have to embrace bitcoin. We expanded on the derivative implications of this reality in a longform piece out this week titled Bitcoin is Eating the World, where we walk through what growing mainstream acceptance of and interest in bitcoin means for the still highly underappreciated bitcoin infrastructure ecosystem. The ETFs are certainly a bullish milestone and signpost, but they are still just a very early indication of the wave of mainstream adoption we see coming over the next decade, and this wave will have seismic implications for early investors in bitcoin’s enabling technologies.
