Bitcoin ETFs continue to suffer, with BlackRock’s IBIT seeing $1.29 billion exit in a dark pool transaction
This exodus comes on the heels of last week’s $1.26 billion in outflows.
Bitcoin ETFs saw their seventh consecutive day of outflows yesterday, their longest losing streak since December. This exodus comes on the heels of last week’s $1.26 billion in outflows, the second consecutive weekly billion-dollar exit and the largest weekly outflow since the week of January 30, according to SoSoValue.
The funds registered a $333.71 million exit Tuesday, the bulk of which stemmed from BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, which saw an unknown investor sell 29 million shares worth a whopping $1.29 billion in a dark pool transaction. Alex Thorne, Galaxy’s head of research, called it “the biggest such trade I’ve ever seen.” A dark pool allows large market participants to buy or sell without disclosing details, usually with minimal impact on the asset’s price.
And in fact, bitcoin didn’t budge when the massive transaction occurred yesterday morning, and several experts said it highlights bitcoin’s resilience and the market’s maturity.
Confirmed.. 29 million share trade ($1.3b) of $IBIT executed at 1030am this morning. This screen shows all the IBIT trades today by size and you can see one of these is not like the others. Price unchanged today so mkt absorbed it well. https://t.co/Otew0DWa3F pic.twitter.com/jZcoKez74K
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) May 26, 2026
Nic Puckrin, cofounder of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood News that the fact that there was liquidity and execution for such a massive trade is the significant point.
“It’s clear there is still enough institutional buying interest and liquidity to absorb a trade of such size, on an ETF that has only existed for just over two years and an asset class that was considered niche until very recently. It’s certainly no longer niche — BlackRock’s IBIT just proved it,” Puckrin said.
Paul Howard, senior director at Wincent, told Sherwood that the move “is the opposite of worrisome,” as moving size at this scale (equivalent to 16,400 BTC) represents the largest institutional IBIT trade on record, while executing it directly between counterparties with minimal price disruption highlights the depth and maturity of the market.
“It’s also notable that there appeared to be a sizeable purchase of long-dated call options around the same time, which may suggest a new participant establishing an IBIT position rather than a straightforward portfolio rebalance. We should have greater clarity once the IBIT flow data is released,” Howard said.
Still, bitcoin ETFs, which have been a strong price support since the war began, are showing signs of weakness as bitcoin drops below the $75,000 line again.
Adam Haeems, head of asset management at Tesseract Group, told Sherwood that while geopolitical headlines move bitcoin on the day, they rarely set the regime.
What Haeems is watching for the rest of the year is whether ETF flows turn net positive on a sustained basis and whether the leveraged book repositions long again rather than staying short into bounces.
“Geopolitical premium will keep getting priced in and out around individual events; the conditions for sustained risk-on in bitcoin specifically require an institutional flow rotation that is not yet in the data,” Haeems said.
Daniela Hathorn, a senior market analyst at Capital.com, told Sherwood that despite this environment, the outflows have not triggered a full breakdown in price action, suggesting that underlying spot demand is still providing support.
“The key question now is whether these outflows are simply a period of profit-taking and consolidation, or the start of a broader cooling in institutional demand,” Hathorn said.
Some analysts have a more nuanced view of the outflows, saying that while this streak is confirmatory of a sentiment shift, it’s not a predictor of where the price goes next.
“The on-chain picture has not broken down, and until it does, or until we see exchange inflows accelerate materially, I would be cautious about reading too much into the headline,” Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at Nansen, told Sherwood.
