On Bitwise’s Bitcoin Standards Investor Day, MicroStrate’s Executive Chairman Michael Saylor set a bold mark for the entire exchange-traded fund landscape, announcing BlackRock’s Ishares Bitcoin Trust (Ticker: IBIT) will become “the largest ETF in a decade.” This sentence immediately runs through the ETF community, with practitioners fully understanding that the current asset-level hierarchy is dominated by a wide range of stock funds rather than unit asset tools.
IBIT has occupied a sparse level of digital finance: According to the Bitcoin Treasury, the trust now has more than 575,000 BTC custody, with an estimated $54.3 billion. The asset regards it as the best ETF launch in history.
Will Bitcoin make BlackRock’s ETF the largest in the world?
However, suspicion is rapid and data-driven. “For some context only…the largest ETF, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) has a box office of over $51 this year. Total assets of IBIT = $54 BIL. [a] Nate Geraci, president of ETF Store and host of ETF Prime.
Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas offers a similar attitude. “I would never say never to be BBC, which breaks all rookie years records, but… King Voo is 10 times bigger and 5 times more cash per day = a flat or negative decade in U.S. stocks while BTC Moons.”
Balchunas detailed that to make IBIT organically close the gap, it requires “north of $1 a day, like $3 b or 4 b/day, if it wishes to get the ground,” and the conclusion is “some extraordinary SHT must… happen…but it is possible.” When asked if investors could absorb Bitcoin’s “perfect saving” narrative faster, Balchunas distilled his answer into the answer “two words, two syllables: cash flow”, emphasizing the gravity that dividends and earnings flows play in portfolio construction.
Saylor’s forecast is in a market environment where BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s own headlines Bitcoin papers have already started. He said on January 22, 2025, during a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Fink told Bloomberg that he said the broad institutional allocation – a “2% or even 5%” portfolio, which he said, citing recent discussions with sovereign wealth funds could raise Bitcoin to “$500,000, $600,000, $600,000, $700,000”.
Fink describes assets as “the currency of fear,” believing that Bitcoin’s borderless design provides a hedge for “the depreciation of your currency or the economic or political stability of your country.”
For Saylor, whose corporate inventory bitcoin strategy makes the strategy a leverage proxy for token prices, Fink’s framework provides macro validation: if sovereign wealth funds are conducted through exploratory dialogue, demand may be limited supply captured within IBIT. The question is implicitly raised by the figures of Geraci and Balchunas – whether this demand can outweigh the relentless inflow of stock indexes over a decade of global investors still associated with cash gene-generated, regulated, familiar assets.
At press time, BTC was trading at $93,656.
Featured images by X @Eleanorterrett, charts by TradingView.com
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