Bitcoin hovers above 64K, ProShares ETF tops $1 billion

Brian Sozzi, Julie Hyman, and Brian Cheung check in on the crypto market after the Bitcoin ETF topped $1 billion in assets and Bitcoin reached a new record high. Watch as the panel discusses what could be next for Bitcoin bulls and ProShares Bitcoin ETF.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: So let's move on just to focus on Bitcoin for a moment-- or more than a moment-- because as we talked about yesterday during the show, we were seeing Bitcoin prices push to a record. They sort of pulled back a little bit from that record. Then they've been pushing higher again this morning.

There it is again. I'd like to not say what they're doing in the moment until we show it because, as we know, things change very quickly when it comes to Bitcoin-- so not at the record any longer, but we are seeing a little bit of increase here. And I don't know, by the way-- maybe you guys know this-- when we look at that 1% gain in Bitcoin, like, what's the Bitcoin settle? Like, how do you determine what the day over day percentage increase is for something that trades 24/7? Let me know.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Can we find that?

BRIAN SOZZI: Take that, Brian. All you.

BRIAN CHEUNG: No, I was gonna say, I mean, I don't think it'd be all that relevant anyway. I mean, to have some sort of intraday versus a closing day settlement price, I think, is irrelevant to people that are interested in the volatility of Bitcoin anyway. It doesn't matter to them if it happened at 4:00 PM Eastern Time or if it happened at 1:00 AM Eastern Time. As long as it goes up, that's all that matters. And when you have price swings of thousands of dollars in a given day, I feel like, you know, there doesn't necessarily need to be an exact settlement quote that you need there.

Now, I just want to kind of drive it back to kind of the overall point here, which is, obviously, all of this coming after the ETF that launched earlier this week-- the Bitcoin [AUDIO OUT], rather. That is really the big catalyst here on Bitcoin.

But I think it's interesting when you juxtapose it against the bank earnings commentary that it got last week, when you had Jamie Dimon, [? a head ?] of JPMorgan Chase earnings, really saying that he thought Bitcoin was worthless. And then a week after that, you have an all-time high on Bitcoin. Again, it's not one leads to the other. But it is interesting to see that things like traditional finance pooh-poohing, if you will, on Bitcoin actually hasn't done anything to quell the rise in these prices.

And it also raises the question of what does Ethereum do next, right? It's above $4,000 right now. You have some people like the likes of Fundstrat coming on our show-- the 11:00 AM show, I believe it was, yesterday, saying they're calling for a 10K price on Ethereum. So whether or not this drags up the other cryptocurrencies in the basket, I think, is something worth watching in the days and months to come.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, look, really, into year end, you're gonna see-- probably see more either futures ETFs, ETFs, you name it. And it's really hard to believe that we won't be sitting here, let's say, six months from now, and Bitcoin will be at higher levels. It's just-- you know, this institutional involvement here is a major catalyst for the space. I look at what PIMCO was saying earlier in the week here, that they're now starting to dabble in cryptos. And when you hear a PIMCO come out and say that they're gonna potentially get more involved with this space here, I mean, that is incredibly bullish here.

JULIE HYMAN: It does matter how these different players will be getting into the space. And I just want to bring up a couple of points here. First of all, there will be another futures ETF that's gonna launch tomorrow. It's the Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy Fund. And I believe this is a more actively managed fund versus the ProShares fund. Why is that important? And by the way, they changed their ticker from BTFD to just BTF.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Boring.

JULIE HYMAN: In any case-- so the thing to mention here, the thing to highlight when you're looking at these futures ETFs-- and this is something that JPMorgan strategists wrote about. It's something that Eric Balchunas of Bloomberg Intelligence highlighted for us earlier in the week-- is that there are substantial carry costs for these Bitcoin futures ETFs. It looks like they might be lower for a more actively managed ETF, according to those strategists.

It's Marko Kolanovic and Bram Kaplan of JPMorgan writing about this, saying that as we see this huge interest in BITO-- that's the ProShares ETF, which I think now traded a billion dollars over its first two days alone-- they wrote, "The futures carry drag could become even larger if these products gather substantial assets." In other words, it is an expensive way to invest in Bitcoin futures.

And so going forward, are we gonna see more institutional money get into these? Are we gonna see it move into the Valkyrie ETF, perhaps, if those carry costs are not going to be substantial? So I think that's gonna be interesting as well as we start to see these products differentiate a little bit.