It is quite unfortunate that such a huge amount of investment did not come to the Bitcoin market directly, rather it had been directed through the centralised entities. If this pace continuous, these corporates can easily out perform the retail investment segment. Probably that will mark and end to the decentralised nature of Bitcoin.
I was never much comfortable about this week corporates buying into Bitcoin. With their money power they can become the dominant players in the market and can manipulate the market as per their wish.
I think people don't understand what decentralization is. Bitcoin is decentralized because of nodes and miners, not because of owners. People buying Bitcoin through ETFs so that these bitcoin are held by institutions in no way diminishes Bitcoin's decentralization. The ETFs have zero effect on nodes and miners.
You say its unfortunate this is not coming from the Bitcoin market directly. But the Bitcoin market IS anyone buying Bitcoin. ETFs are simply part of the Bitcoin market now. They've expanded the Bitcoin market, which is a great thing. Good money is both a transactional unit and a savings/investable unit, and ETFs simply make use of its great savings/investable property. All of this is the Bitcoin market. Like, you realize the "Bitcoin market" you are referring to is already centralized crypto exchanges right? haha. It's all the Bitcoin market, and most of the market buys through centralized entities, and some of the market participants have always kept their Bitcoin with these entities, which of course is the case with ETFs.
People seem to get very confused about what decentralization is, and their confused version of it makes them want to gate-keep Bitcoin and stop anyone with money or any govt or any company or any finance firm from buying Bitcoin, which is very against the ideals of Bitcoin.
All the US spot bitcoin ETFs now hold a combined total of 192,000 bitcoin assets under management, recently surpassing Microstrategy's holdings of 190,000.
The difference is it took Michael Saylor two to three years to amass that amount. The Spot bitcoin ETFs did it in one month! That is crazy.
I don't think it's ok to compare an achievement of a number of multi billion dollar companies to a single one.
Microstrategy as a whole is worth close to 11 billion, while BlackRock alone is worth almost 120 billion, while Fidelity manages assets worth 4.5 trillion dollars.
Microstrategy showed them the way, but it's like a mouse on the path of an elephant. It will always be remembered as a precursor of institutional investments, but a year from now it's going to be so small compared to these guys that nobody will ever mention it in comparison.
And in fact that comparison is worse than what you state. It's not even comparing one company to 11 companies. It's comparing one company to the entire US TradFi industry! Any TradFi investor who doesn't want to bother actually owning bitcoin, or any financial fund that literally can't own Bitcoin because Bitcoin isn't part of TradFi (ie retirement accounts, investment funds with rules on what they can buy), can only gain access to Bitcoin through the ETFs.
So it's comparing a single moderately sized corporation to literally millions of people and many companies combined haha.