Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest Buys Another $15M of its Spot Bitcoin ETF Shares

Cathie Wood

’s Ark Invest has continued to buy its own ARK 21Shares spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) worth $15 million.

Cathie Wood and Ark Invest's trade activity from today 1/18 pic.twitter.com/zFT4XXbstM

— Ark Invest Daily (@ArkkDaily) January 19, 2024

According to Ark Invest Daily, the firm’s ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW) purchased 365,695 shares of ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) on Jan. 18. With Thursday’s closing price at $40.95, this most recent purchase is worth around $15 million.

Ark Invest Allocating Funds to Its Bitcoin ETF to Gain Scale

Previously on Jan. 16, ARKW bought 365,427 shares of ARKB that amounted to 1% of ARKW’s holdings. Since the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the Bitcoin ETFs on the same day, it would not grant any ETF an early advantage. However, moving the money from one fund to another could help the ETF gain potential.

Cathie Wood and Ark Invest's trade activity from today 1/16 pic.twitter.com/RiBGT3BV8T

— Ark Invest Daily (@ArkkDaily) January 17, 2024

Bloomberg Intelligence claimed that funneling Ark Invest’s own money into ARKB is a measure taken to gain scale swiftly. The SEC’s approval has “set up an unusually high-stakes horse race, given that all the funds hold the same underlying asset.”

The spot Bitcoin ETF’s scale is “an important criteria for financial advisers and platforms, many of which have minimum-asset thresholds,” according to Bloomberg.

Cathie Wood: Bitcoin Network is Larger than Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Combined

Ark Invest Director of Digital Assets Yassine Elmandjra has published a post on social media, stating that Bitcoin’s hash rate has hit an all-time high of 500 exahashes/s.

To address to that impressive number, Elmandjra made a few comparisons, saying, “For every star in our galaxy, the Bitcoin network is calculating 5 billion computations per second; It would take ~2000 years for the entire global population, each performing one hash/second, to match the Bitcoin network’s hash rate.”

“The Bitcoin network performs ~67 times more hashes per second than there are grains of sand on Earth,” said Elmandjra. “By number of raw operations/second, Bitcoin is ~500x more performant than the world’s most powerful supercomputer.”

“Yet, there are skeptics out there that still believe ‘bitcoin is backed by nothing’,” he concluded.

Bitcoin is backed by the largest computer network in the world, a network orders of magnitude larger than the combined size of the clouds that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have built over the last 15-20 years. https://t.co/TsSDyTTyuk

— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) January 19, 2024

Wood seconded the post, adding, “Bitcoin is backed by the largest computer network in the world, a network orders of magnitude larger than the combined size of the clouds that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have built over the last 15-20 years.”