Ark Invest, led by Cathie Wood, has continued its investment in the ARK 21Shares spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) with a recent purchase of $15 million worth of shares. The ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW), under Ark Invest, acquired 365,695 shares of the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) on January 18, valuing the purchase at around $15 million based on the closing price of $40.95.
This move follows a previous investment on January 16, where ARKW bought 365,427 shares of ARKB, constituting 1% of ARKW’s holdings. The approval of Bitcoin ETFs by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the same day led to a competitive landscape among these funds, with the allocation of funds from one fund to another seen as a strategic measure to gain potential advantage.
Bloomberg Intelligence suggested that Ark Invest’s decision to invest in ARKB with its own funds is a tactic to rapidly gain scale, as the scale of the spot Bitcoin ETF becomes a crucial factor for financial advisers and platforms, many of which have minimum-asset thresholds.
Yassine Elmandjra, Ark Invest’s Director of Digital Assets, highlighted Bitcoin’s hash rate reaching an all-time high of 500 exahashes/s. He compared this impressive figure to the computations per second by stating that for every star in the galaxy, the Bitcoin network is performing 5 billion computations. Elmandjra emphasized the network’s unmatched performance, stating that Bitcoin performs around 67 times more hashes per second than there are grains of sand on Earth and is approximately 500 times more powerful than the world’s most robust supercomputer in terms of raw operations per second.
Cathie Wood echoed this sentiment, asserting that Bitcoin is backed by the largest computer network globally, surpassing the combined size of the cloud infrastructure built by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft over the past 15-20 years. Wood addressed skeptics who claim that “bitcoin is backed by nothing,” emphasizing the strength and significance of the Bitcoin network.
