A single dark pool trade involving $1.29 billion worth of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (NASDAQ: IBIT) has drawn widespread attention across cryptocurrency markets.
The trade was executed at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time and represents what analysts are calling the largest privately negotiated off-exchange sale of its kind ever recorded.
Alex Thorn of Galaxy flagged the transaction on X, describing it as the biggest dark pool trade of its kind he has ever seen.
Dark pool trades are privately negotiated, executed off exchange, and conceal the identity of the counterparty, allowing large sellers to avoid crashing the market price of an asset.
Despite the enormous size of the sale, total net IBIT redemptions on the same day came in at only $192.44 million, leaving a gap of roughly $1.1 billion in shares that were not redeemed for the underlying asset.
That gap strongly suggests the counterparty on the other side of the trade chose to hold the IBIT shares rather than redeem them, pointing to a long-term investor with significant conviction.
Analyst Scott Melker noted that this is likely why Bitcoin’s price did not move dramatically following the transaction, as the shares were absorbed by a willing buyer rather than converted into selling pressure.
The dark pool trade occurred against a backdrop of seven consecutive days of net outflows from US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs, which Melker described as the second longest such streak on record.
Outflows across the broader Bitcoin ETF market have reached approximately $1.8 billion over those seven days, with $2.26 billion withdrawn over the past two weeks.
Melker noted that Bitcoin currently ranks 13th among the world’s largest assets by market capitalization, now sitting below Tesla, Meta, Saudi Aramco, and Broadcom in the rankings.
Gold holds the top position by a margin of nearly six times the market cap of the second-ranked asset, a gap Melker noted was far narrower in previous years.
Melker acknowledged that Bitcoin has moved in the opposite direction to many other top assets recently but maintained his long-term bullish outlook, stating, “I remain a Bitcoin bull and say, you just kind of hold on to this thing and you don’t worry about it.”
He added that the willingness of an unknown buyer to absorb $1.29 billion in IBIT shares through a private transaction reflects meaningful long-term conviction in the asset.
