Up more than 50% already this year, Bitcoin hit $69,170.63 before falling back below $68,000. Crypto’s OG surpassed $1.3 trillion market cap for the second time in history yesterday, according to CoinGecko data. The coin is now also up more than 200% from a year ago.

Mainstream financial institutions, such as BlackRock and Fidelity, issuing spot ETFs has driven investors toward the cryptocurrency. The exchange-traded products have made it easier for retail investors and IRA holders to gain exposure to Bitcoin without needing to buy it from a crypto exchange or navigate on-chain wallets.

ETF inflows reached a record high last week at $760 million, and collectively they have accumulated over $50 billion of assets under management in two months of trading, as of Tuesday.

The ten spot bitcoin ETFs have blown through $50b in assets.. began life 7 weeks ago under $30b. About $8b of it is from flows, the rest from bitcoin value going up. pic.twitter.com/CZCl4mdd7Y

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) March 5, 2024

BlackRock Inc.’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and Fidelity Investments’ Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) have captured over 79% of total inflows into the so-called Newborn Nine—a nickname for the group of new ETFs, excluding Grayscale’s GBTC, which has seen billions of dollars in outflows.

On Friday, IBIT jumped above $10 billion in assets under management after receiving a record $612 million of inflows in a single day. And already, the $7.7 billion in year-to-date Bitcoin inflows have exceeded all inflows from 2021, according to Bank of America Global Research’s Flow Show team.

Another major tailwind for Bitcoin is the upcoming so-called “halving,” which cuts the daily supply of newly minted coins by 50%—an event that has historically caused prices to soar. As the next halving rapidly approaches on or around April 19, 2024, investors have been anticipating a similar pattern.

Following the previous halvings, the price had climbed 8,760% to $1,152, 2,570% to $17,760, and 594% to $67,549 by the following year.

“Over a long period of time, I think you’re going to see institutions being the majority holder of Bitcoin, whereas historically, it was more retail — that’s why you’ve seen the price rise. On top of this, there is some anticipation that after the halving with supply being less, the price could be much higher,” Robert Le, crypto analyst at Pitchbook.