21Shares CEO points to 'inflection point in the global order' as crypto hits mainstream popularity

Speaking from The Block's Emergence conference in Prague this week, industry leaders touted the confluence of economic, political and technological factors over the past 12 months that led to this moment.

“We’re seeing an inflection point in the global order for the first time in a long time,” Hany Rashwan, the co-founder and CEO of 21Shares said Friday. “We’re seeing a threat to the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar. We’ve seen it with the euro bond, with the oil crisis and it’s weathered through it. So we're entering a period of probably five to 20 years where a lot of people make a lot of moves and we’ll see how it ends up.”

Though 21 Shares has 53 exchange-traded products in Europe, the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ticker: ARKB) was one of 11 Bitcoin ETFs to debut in the U.S. market this past January. The popularity of those funds helped push bitcoin past the $70,000 level in March, and, following a price correction through the summer, it was pushed even further amid the reelection of Donald Trump, a pro-crypto presidential candidate in the U.S.

“There’s just a huge amount of very serious names from the United States, the institutional players that are sort of putting their weight behind this [and] activating their distribution networks here,” said Daniel Seifert, vice president and regional managing director, EMEA of Coinbase.

The most prominent name on that list is BlackRock, the largest BTC ETF by AUM. On Monday, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) crossed 500,000 BTC (or $48 billion) in assets under management. BlackRock CEO Larry Funk admitted in July that he was "wrong" about cryptocurrency and has changed his tune over the past five years.

“BlackRock surpassing 500,000 BTC is yet another huge milestone after a tremendous launch year,” said K33 Head of Research Vetle Lunde. “It remains the third strongest ETF instrument in the U.S. measured by YTD flow, ahead of Invesco's $314 billion behemoth QQQ.”

The rise of stablecoin adoption has also pushed overall crypto demand, according to John Svolos, head of research at SkyBridge Capital.

“Oddly, the killer app outside of Bitcoin and crypto is the U.S. dollar stablecoin. So at the same time that you can attribute the demand for bitcoin to concerns about any fiat currency, the U.S. is actually benefiting through the globalization driven by the dollar stablecoin.”

Tether's USDT, the world's largest U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, has seen its market cap surge in the past three weeks, something Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino attributes to heavy inflows into Bitcoin ETFs.

"Just in the last 20 days, Tether’s market cap grew around $16 billion," Ardoino said Thursday at Emergence. "Part of it is due to the fact that there was a very important inflow into [spot bitcoin] ETFs," adding that MicroSteegy's Michael Saylor and "many others started to purchase bitcoin at a very fast pace, especially after the election."

The price of bitcoin is up 30% since the Nov. 5 U.S. election, trading around $97,800 at publication time according to The Block's BTC price page.