Institutional appetite for a spot Bitcoin ETF boosted confidence in the flagship token – BlackRock wants a piece of the action.

Bitcoin prices surged to a celebrated $31,300 per token on Friday, marking the cryptocurrency’s highest level since early June 2022. The rally was in large part thanks to strong signs of elevated interest from institutional investors – a fundamental prerequisite to help pop open the floodgates of mainstream adoption.

A few whales in the making are sitting on applications with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch their own exchange traded funds that hold actual Bitcoin. The world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, and smaller fund rivals Invesco and WisdomTree, compete to create the first US-based spot Bitcoin ETF.

Refresher: Presently, there is no spot Bitcoin ETF in the US. Rather, there are only Bitcoin futures products on the market. The US financial watchdog, the SEC, has so far labeled such spot BTC ETFs as too volatile and prone to market manipulation. BlackRock’s ETF, however, promises to monitor and control these risks.