A Wild Few Minutes Drive Bitcoin Above $35,000 as ETF Excitement Starts to Thaw the Crypto Winter

It was exciting enough for crypto observers when bitcoin (BTC) topped $31,000 on Monday.

And then its price went straight up. Late in the day, bitcoin took out $32,000, then $33,000, then $34,000 and finally $35,000 in just a few minutes. Perpetual contracts listed on Binance's exchange almost topped $36,000.

The original cryptocurrency was back at levels last seen in May 2022, before the Terra-Luna, Three Arrows Capital, Genesis and FTX debacles turned the mood so sour that BTC approached $15,000 and the very survival of the industry was, to some, called into question.

But the mood has improved markedly, fueled largely by prospects that bitcoin ETFs – which promoters say will make it dramatically easier to buy BTC, potentially hugely broadening the pool of potential investors – are on the way.

Read more: Bitcoin Tops $35K, Hitting 16-Month High; Options Positioning Suggests Price Has Further to Run

Grayscale (which, like CoinDesk, is owned by Digital Currency Group) runs the biggest exchange-traded bitcoin product at the moment, but it's structured as a trust, which has shortcomings. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rejected its attempt to turn the product into a more-appealing ETF, but a court recently blasted that rejection and the SEC isn't appealing, boosting the odds Grayscale will get itself an ETF.

And BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, is high on bitcoin's prospects and has its own bitcoin ETF application in at the SEC – as do other conventional financial firms. "We're hearing from clients around the world about the need for crypto," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently told Fox Business.

Fink put crypto in rarified company during the interview, saying it will be another haven asset for investors, similar to U.S. Treasuries or gold. "I believe crypto will play that type of role as a flight-to-quality," he told Fox Business.

The BlackRock ETF has just showed up on the website of Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. – a key market utility in the U.S. that processes all securities transactions. A normally boring page showed the prospective security with a unique ID number known as a CUSIP, something all manner of stocks, bonds and other assets get. Its appearance on that page doesn't mean the ETF has been approved, but the fact that BlackRock has gone this far in its prep work certainly indicates optimism.

"All part of the process of bringing ETF to market," Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas posted on X.

In the hour around the rapid late-Monday BTC surge, more than $167 million in derivative positions were liquidated, adding to the daily total of $344 million, according to CoinGlass. Open interest, a metric that records the notional value of all derivatives positions, failed to keep pace with bitcoin's rise, dropping from a peak of $10.5 billion to $9.4 billion as a result of liquidations, short positions being stopped out and those in long positions taking profits.

There is also an emerging narrative pointed out in Galaxy Digital's latest market report about the options market. At around $32,500, "options dealers will need to purchase almost $20 million of BTC for every 1% move up to stay delta neutral," the report said.