BITO

Unprecedented demand for the ProShares futures fund could result in longer contracts that may stray from Bitcoin prices.

The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF is on track to reach a limit on the number of futures contracts it’s allowed after quickly becoming a little too popular.

After just a couple of days of trading, the ProShares ETF has reached 1,900 contracts sold for October and there is 2,000 front-month limit imposed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

There are already 1,400 contracts for November and there is an overall maximum limit of 5,000 open contracts according to Bloomberg. One solution could be to offer longer contracts, but that would carry the danger of too much distancing from BTC prices.

President of the advisory firm the ETF Store, Nate Geraci, commented that the fund could start to diverge from market prices, adding:

“The ETF is forced to obtain Bitcoin price exposure at higher and higher prices as it goes further out on the futures curve.”

The launch of competing products such as the Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF which will commence trading today, and the VanEck ETF which is expected to trade on Monday, Oct. 25, may dilute the demand for the ProShares fund.

As reported by Cointelegraph, the ProShares ETF became the first-ever fund to hit $1 billion in assets under management in just two days. It beat an 18-year-old record previously held by a gold-based fund that did it in three.

Bloomberg senior ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas, said that the momentum will still be hard to stop at this point.

“The unprecedented early volume in BITO makes it like a snowball rolling downhill, as liquidity and assets begets more liquidity and assets.”

Related: VanEck Bitcoin Strategy ETF will likely launch next week as crypto prices reach ATHs

Balchunas also thinks that the success of Bitcoin futures products may speed up the approval of a spot-based Bitcoin ETF.

“Both the success, general functioning of ETFs and the clear issue of potential capacity of futures may get the SEC to reconsider or work out a path for spot.”

As reported by Cointelegraph on Oct. 18, Grayscale has already anticipated this and is preparing to convert its popular Bitcoin Trust into a physically-backed product based on spot markets.

The ProShares Bitcoin ETF has beaten an 18-year-old record for the fastest fund to a billion-dollar AUM.

Since the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF started trading this week, it has become the fastest fund ever to reach $1 billion in assets under management (AUM).

The highly anticipated launch of the first Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund in the United States, BITO, has resulted in a number of milestone achievements.

Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas reported that the fund was the quickest ever to reach a ten-figure AUM after just two days of trading. BITO easily surpassed the previous record holder, a gold-based fund with the ticker GLD, which took three days to hit the billion-dollar mark in 2004.

He commented that this was “poetically apropos,” presumably in reference to Bitcoin’s store of value properties and comparison to digital gold.

RECORD BREAKER: $BITO assets up to $1.1b after today, making it the fastest ETF to get to $1b (2 days) breaking $GLD’s 18yr old record (3 days), which is poetically apropos. https://t.co/yGXyfwaogD

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 20, 2021

Balchunas exclaimed “I’ve never seen anything like this. I bet ProShares is even shocked,” while retweeting a post by Bloomberg Intelligence research analyst, James Seyffart, who updated the original chart.

Balchunas commented that there may not be any contracts left to buy if this volume continues, referring to a post by ETFStore President Nate Geraci stating that nearly 45% of BITO exposure is now in November futures contracts.

“If $BITO keeps up this pace of inflows it won’t have any futures left to buy by the end of the month due to pos [position] limits.”

The ProShares fund also broke the record for the highest-ever first day of organic volume which hit $1 billion on Oct. 19 when it launched. More than 24 million shares were traded during its debut day and since the ETF went live, it has now traded more than $2 billion in volume.

Related: VanEck Bitcoin Strategy ETF will likely launch next week as crypto prices reach ATHs

Balchunas has predicted that the next Bitcoin futures fund launch will be on Friday. This is likely to be the Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF which is changing its ticker back to BTF in preparation. In crypto circles, the former ticker BTFD also referred to "buy the f*cking dip," which may not have gone down too well with the SEC.

I had said this was launching tmrw it’s actually going to be on Friday. sorry about that. https://t.co/fqaGwjgscO

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 20, 2021

The momentum has driven Bitcoin prices to a new all-time high of $67,276 on Oct. 20 according to CoinGecko. At the time of writing, the asset had retreated slightly to change hands around the $65,230 mark.