Although Santander Bank was a bit skeptical about the cryptocurrency sector in 2022, leading it to limit Bitcoin (BTC) payments, the Spanish banking giant seems to have drastically changed its tune, coinciding with a wave of applications for a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) by major financial and asset management institutions.
As it happens, Santander has recently started a ‘Digital Assets 101’ educational series on its website, “breaking down the fundamentals, benefits, and implications of this transformative technology,” the company said on its Twitter profile when introducing its first lesson on Bitcoin on June 9.
Seven days after the introductory lesson called ‘Everything you need to know about Bitcoin,’ the bank shared another lecture, this time focusing on “all the pros and cons” of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network protocol, for which it said it “enables high volumes of instantaneous micropayments, supporting millions of transactions per second.”
Increased institutional interest
Interestingly, this change in tune arrives around the same time when multiple large mainstream institutions have started to recognize the opportunities that the cryptocurrency space offers, jumping on the Bitcoin ETF bandwagon as a way to offer their clients access to crypto assets without direct exposure.
Specifically, the firms that have recently filed or re-filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF include the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), digital asset management firm Valkyrie, independent investment management company Invesco (NYSE: IVZ), global ETF and exchange-traded product (ETP) sponsor WisdomTree, as well as crypto index fund manager Bitwise.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin was, at the time of publication, changing hands at the price of $30,197, demonstrating an increase of 4.39% on the day, a 21.25% gain across the previous week, and a growth of 10.64% on its monthly chart, as it adds up to more than an 80% advance since the year’s turn, according to the most recent data retrieved by Finbold on June 22.
