On Feb. 26, BlackRock purchased roughly 4,309 BTC, valued at around $289.6 million, within just one hour. The transfers were from the Coinbase Prime hot wallets to the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) wallets. The move occurred amid the largest daily inflows into U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs in the last two weeks.
BlackRock Receives Bitcoin from Coinbase
Data published by Arkham Intelligence, which was shared by Lookonchain, showed that 300 BTC was transferred multiple times to IBIT-associated addresses. There were two transfers at the same minute mark, and some of the other transactions were done at time intervals of three to four minutes.
Each 300 BTC was valued at around $20.1 to $20.2 million based on current prices. There was one smaller transaction of approximately 108.6 BTC, valued at almost $7.3 million. The timestamp log sets the activity to around 5:45 PM UTC.
BlackRock purchased BTC worth $64.5 million five days ago, a day after the company transferred $173 million in BTC to Coinbase. There were concerns about a sell-off, as other Bitcoin ETFs saw outflows on the same day IBIT made the transfer to Coinbase.
However, the institutional demand for the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF has risen. These increases were reflected in the IBIT holdings disclosure of Jane Street and Mubadala Investment Fund based on their last SEC filing.
Bitcoin ETFs Inflows Hit Two-Week High
According to SoSoValue data, the daily net inflow into U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs stood at $506.51 million on Feb. 25, the highest 1-day inflow in two weeks. Their cumulative net inflows are now almost $54.57 billion.
IBIT had a net inflow of $297.37 million, which was the highest among the Bitcoin ETFs. FBTC Fidelity recorded $30.09 million, and GBTC had $102.49 million. BITB by Bitwise registered $39.37 million in net inflows.
Bitcoin ETFs by Grayscale and VanEck added $19.29 million and $15.61 million, respectively. ARKB by ARK 21Shares reported $2.29 million in inflows. The smaller ETFs, such as BTCO, BRRR, EZBC, BTCW, and DEFI, had zero net flows. The flow concentration in IBIT is an affirmation that it is still the biggest spot Bitcoin ETF in the U.S. in terms of assets.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas stated that the demand was timely. This is because there had been several weeks of continuous outflows from these Bitcoin ETFs. However, he warned that it is not yet clear whether the inflows, which have happened for the second consecutive day, are the start of a long-term rally or just a short-term recovery.
Nonetheless, the increase in inflows by Bitcoin ETFs has been accompanied by a fall in the BTC price. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading near $66,900, down 1.6% from the previous day, according to TradingView.
According to Glassnode, recent profit-taking by Bitcoin holders has stalled the cryptocurrency below $70,000. The analytics firm indicated that all recovery efforts since the beginning of February had hit demand exhaustion at this price level.