Unsurprisingly, the growing popularity and acceptance of Bitcoin ETFs appear to be shifting the crypto investment landscape. As recently revealed by a prominent analyst on the social media platform X, BTC investors seem to be favoring a more traditional way to interact with the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
This on-chain insight is based on the Glassnode Entities Net Growth metric, which measures the rate at which new users are coming onto a blockchain network per day (Bitcoin, in this scenario). Woo clarified that this metric does not just track addresses but entities, which refer to addresses forensically clustered together into single controlling users.
The Entities Net Growth estimates the difference between new entities and “disappearing” entities (entities with a zero balance that had a non–zero balance at the previous timestamp). As observed in the chart below, this metric has been on a downward trend since 2023, which has worsened since the Bitcoin ETFs debuted in the US.
Interestingly, this development somewhat defeats the primary ethos of Bitcoin as defined by Satoshi Nakamoto, which revolves around building a decentralized financial system. However, the belief is that the Bitcoin ETFs are a gateway to crypto investments for people—primarily the older generation—who can’t easily access them via the typical route (self-custody wallets).
A crypto community member on X:
ETFs didn’t steal users from cold storage… They opened the market to those who were locked behind compliance walls.
As of this writing, the price of BTC stands at around $108,200, reflecting a 0.4% increase in the past 24 hours.
