As recently reported by Arkham Intelligence, BlackRock - the giant hedge fund with over $10 trillion in assets under management - bought more Bitcoin (BTC) this week than any ETF issuer has sold in the past three weeks. The purchases were made for BlackRock's own IBIT spot Bitcoin ETF and totaled the equivalent of $388.19 million over the past four days.
As of today, the hedge fund's total cryptocurrency holdings amount to 362,193 BTC, or the equivalent of $23.79 billion. For comparison, this is over 100,000 BTC more than the amount held by the nearest competitor, Grayscale.
There is no mystery behind such groundbreaking activity from BlackRock's side toward the major cryptocurrency. As the fund's head of digital assets recently revealed, for them, Bitcoin is not a risky gamble, but rather a scarce, global, decentralized, nonsovereign asset that has no country risk and no traditional counterparty risk.
From the perspective of a $10 trillion asset management firm, BTC is more like digital gold than a beta to the NASDAQ and tech stocks in general.
BlackRock's interest in cryptocurrencies does not end there, however, as the fund recently launched its spot Ethereum ETF solution. These ETFs have not seen the same hype as those focused on Bitcoin, but the number of ETH in BlackRock's wallet is growing regardless.
It remains to be seen if we will see the appropriate level of acceptance for Ethereum from the financial giant, but at least the trend seems to be there.