BlackRock executive says new Ethereum ETF faces ‘narrative’ challenge.

Speaking at the Messari Mainnet conference in New York, Mitchnick admitted that the performance of BlackRock’s exchange-traded fund for Ethereum — known as ETHA — has so far been “underwhelming” compared to its Bitcoin ETF. But he urged the audience to compare ETHA to ETFs as a whole: “It’s very rare to see an ETF reach a billion AUM in seven weeks like ETHA did. In most cases, it takes several years for a new ETF to never reach a billion.”

The world’s largest asset manager launched its Bitcoin ETF in January with success as IBIT reached $2 billion in assets under management in 15 days. ETHA’s debut in July was much less profitable, accumulating about $1 billion in a month. Today, IBIT sits at $24 billion in assets under management, while ETHA remains at around $1 billion.

“With ETH, I think the story and the investment story is a little bit easy for a lot of investors to digest, so that’s a big part of why we’re so committed to the educational journey that we’re going on with a lot of us. customers,” Mitchnick said. “And so, don’t expect them to ever be as big in terms of flows and AUM as their Bitcoin counterparts are. But it’s still a pretty good start.”

Bitcoin and Ether ETFs

BlackRock is one of the largest asset managers that has adopted crypto as an integral part of its business strategy, but it is not the only one.

BlackRock began trading spot Bitcoin ETFs in January, along with ten others approved by the SEC at the same time, an unprecedented and transformative decision making cryptocurrencies accessible to mainstream investors. Since then, spot Bitcoin ETFs have acquired $61 billion in new cumulative total assets, according to SoSoValue data. Bitcoin spot ETFs recently had a monster run, pulling in $365 million in a single day. BlackRock, Fidelity and ARK Invest consistently lead the charge for spot Bitcoin ETFs.

More recently, the SEC approved nine spot Ether ETFs. BlackRock, Fidelity, Bitwise and Invesco are among the companies that have launched Ether ETFs. Since their launch, these ETFs have collectively raised approximately $7 billion.

During his Mainnet interview, Mitchnick also discussed the upcoming election, decentralized finance, and tokenization