BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust lost $527.84 million on Wednesday, the second-largest single-day net outflow since the fund launched in January 2024, according to SoSoValue data.
This figure narrowly missed the record. IBIT’s largest outflow on record remains the $528.3 million withdrawn on January 30, of which Wednesday’s drawdown came close to around $500,000. The fund holds approximately $59 billion in assets and represents nearly 4% of the total Bitcoin supply, making it the largest vehicle for institutional exposure to Bitcoin.
This exodus was part of a larger exodus. The 11 U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs lost a total of $733.43 million on Wednesday, with Fidelity’s FBTC losing $60.30 million and Grayscale’s GBTC losing $104.76 million alongside the IBIT drawdown. The complex has now seen outflows for several consecutive sessions, with more than $2 billion withdrawn in the last two weeks.
The sell-off occurred on the same day that Bitcoin fell below $73,000. The cryptocurrency was trading at $72,978 on Thursday, down 3.4% over 24 hours, after US airstrikes on an Iranian military site near the Strait of Hormuz reignited a conflict whose markets had begun to appreciate. ETF outflows and price declines fueled each other, with redemptions forcing BlackRock and other issuers to sell the underlying bitcoin to settle investor outflows.
The IBIT drawdown came a day after another eye-catching move by the fund. On Tuesday, a single investor sold $1.29 billion worth of IBIT stock in a dark pool block transaction, as reported by CoinDesk.
A dark pool operation is a privately negotiated transaction that allows large players to change size without notifying the market as a whole.
This block sale is not the same as a net exit, since buyers can step in to absorb the volume, and IBIT’s actual net buybacks on Tuesday totaled $192.44 million. But the two events taken together indicate that institutional players are reducing their exposure to bitcoin as the macroeconomic context changes.
Flow data has been pointing in this direction for weeks. ETF accumulation over the year had already dwindled to a net amount of around 4,500 BTC, and May moved from regular March and April purchases to distribution, as reported on Wednesday. Bitcoin fell from over $82,000 on May 6 to below $73,000 today, and the ETF channel that drove the 2025 rally spent the month pulling money in the other direction.
Whether these exits reflect tactical de-risking amid the Hormuz headlines or a deeper institutional retrenchment depends on what happens once the situation in the Middle East stabilizes. IBIT has seen long streaks of capital outflows previously during this cycle without a permanent reversal, with money returning each time the macroeconomic situation improved.
