BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, ticker IBIT, launched in January 2024, according to CoinDesk’s 29 November 2025 report. It is structured as a Delaware statutory grantor trust that holds bi
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, ticker IBIT, launched in January 2024, according to CoinDesk’s 29 November 2025 report. It is structured as a Delaware statutory grantor trust that holds bitcoin and issues shares tracking its value, according to an article bylined to news.bitcoin.com, dated 17 July 2026 and republished by CryptoNews.net. It is not a mutual fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, which means it does not carry that law’s custody rules, leverage limits or governance requirements, per the same news.bitcoin.com report. Owning a share of IBIT means owning a beneficial interest in the trust, not a direct claim on specific coins.
Coinbase, through Coinbase Custody Trust Company, is the custodian most spot bitcoin ETFs concentrate their holdings with, including IBIT, according to the news.bitcoin.com report carried by CryptoNews.net. In filings submitted on 8 April 2025, BlackRock added Anchorage Digital Bank as a second custodian for IBIT and for its ether fund, ETHA, Decrypt reported. Anchorage is described in that filing as the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the U.S., having received its charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in January 2021, per Decrypt. At the time of the filing, BlackRock stated the funds involved were the $45 billion IBIT and the $1.8 billion ETHA, according to Decrypt’s account of the SEC filings.
BlackRock said the Anchorage arrangement would not disturb its existing custody relationship with Coinbase and that it had no plan to move existing funds over, but that it retains the ability to split holdings between the two custodians at its own discretion, Decrypt reported. BlackRock described the move as reflecting an “ongoing risk management approach” and an “expanding presence in the digital asset space,” according to language in the filing cited by Decrypt. Anchorage co-founder and chief executive Nathan McCauley said in a statement carried by Decrypt that the bank aimed to help set “a new standard for tailored access” to digital assets. How much of IBIT’s bitcoin currently sits with Coinbase versus Anchorage is not publicly disclosed, and BlackRock can change that split without a public announcement.
Custody arrangements differ across the category. Decrypt reported that Fidelity self-custodies the bitcoin behind its own fund, that VanEck uses Gemini as custodian, and that Anchorage separately holds assets for 21Shares’ funds. Fidelity’s self-custody runs through its own affiliate, Fidelity Digital Assets, according to the news.bitcoin.com report.
There is no single current figure for IBIT’s size, because different sources measure it differently on different dates. According to CoinDesk’s 29 November 2025 report, IBIT became the fastest ETF in history to reach $70 billion in assets, doing so in 341 days after its January 2024 launch, and stood at $70.7 billion in net assets as of that date, per SoSoValue data cited by CoinDesk. The same report said IBIT had generated an estimated $245 million in annual fees by October 2025, held over 3% of bitcoin’s total supply, and had drawn more than $52 billion in net inflows in its first year.
A separate, later snapshot from BlackRock’s own holdings disclosure, reported by news.bitcoin.com and republished by CryptoNews.net, put IBIT’s holdings at 734,762 bitcoin worth $48 billion as of 15 July 2026. That figure is self-reported by BlackRock and reflects a different date and a different bitcoin price than the November 2025 CoinDesk figures; the two should not be treated as comparable or averaged. Speaking at a Blockchain Conference event in São Paulo, BlackRock Brazil’s director of business development, Cristiano Castro, said combined allocations across IBIT and the firm’s Brazil-listed IBIT39 product had come close to $100 billion, calling the scale “a big surprise,” according to CoinDesk. Castro also said BlackRock’s own Strategic Income Opportunities Portfolio had increased its IBIT stake by 14%, per the same report.
Zooming out to the whole category, panelists at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference put combined US spot bitcoin ETF assets at roughly $107 billion as of a 6 May 2026 CoinDesk report, split roughly as $20 billion in institutional hedge fund holdings, $12.5 billion allocated by registered investment advisors, and about 60% sitting in direct retail accounts. Calamos Investments’ Christopher Russell noted that $12.5 billion figure is small next to the $146 trillion in total advisor-managed assets, a gap he attributed partly to what he called the “1% problem”: advisors are reluctant to hold client conversations about a volatile position even at small allocation sizes, per CoinDesk.
IBIT’s trust is a separate legal entity from BlackRock. If BlackRock as sponsor collapsed, creditors of BlackRock generally could not reach the trust’s bitcoin, and the trustee — BlackRock Fund Advisors — would retain authority to keep the trust running or wind it down, according to the news.bitcoin.com report. A sponsor failure would likely trigger termination provisions in the trust agreement: the trustee would sell the bitcoin, pay expenses and creditors, and distribute remaining cash to shareholders through the Depository Trust Company. Trading could pause and shares could trade at a discount to bitcoin’s price while that process plays out. The news.bitcoin.com report stresses this is entirely theoretical, since no major spot bitcoin ETF sponsor has failed since the category launched in January 2024, and the analysis rests on Delaware trust law rather than tested case history.
The bigger disclosed risk sits with the custodian, not the sponsor, according to the news.bitcoin.com report. Most spot bitcoin ETFs concentrate custody with Coinbase Custody Trust Company. If Coinbase became insolvent, a bankruptcy court might decide that bitcoin segregated for ETF clients nonetheless forms part of Coinbase’s estate, which would leave the trust holding an unsecured claim rather than a direct one. An automatic stay would then halt recovery efforts while the matter is litigated, a process that could run for years and return only part of the fund’s value, according to the news.bitcoin.com report. New York’s banking regulator, the Department of Financial Services, has published guidance favoring treating custody clients as beneficiaries of custodied assets rather than as general creditors in a bankruptcy, but that guidance is not binding on a federal bankruptcy court, the news.bitcoin.com report noted. The 2022 collapse of FTX, where commingled customer assets were pulled into bankruptcy proceedings, is described in that report as the closest real-world precedent regulators and attorneys point to.
Insurance covers only part of the exposure. Coinbase maintains crime insurance covering roughly $320 million, shared across its institutional custody clients, against more than $100 billion in bitcoin held collectively across spot bitcoin ETFs, according to the news.bitcoin.com report. Custodian liability agreements can cap damages at figures as low as $5 million in some cases, the report noted. An account holding ETF shares is separately covered by SIPC, which protects up to $500,000 per account if the broker itself fails, with a $250,000 sub-limit for cash, the news.bitcoin.com report said. That coverage applies only to the shares as securities. It offers nothing if the trust’s own bitcoin loses value because its custodian collapses, and no scheme insures the underlying bitcoin the way deposit insurance backs bank cash, per the same report.
Regulators have made one structural change: the SEC approved in-kind creation and redemption for spot bitcoin ETFs in 2025, reducing the need to sell bitcoin to meet cash redemptions, the news.bitcoin.com report said. That improves operational efficiency but does not remove custody risk.
Custody concentration is not unique to IBIT. CoinShares chief executive Jean-Marie Mognetti told the same Consensus Miami panel that most issuers rely on one custodian, saying it is “creating a massive concentration risk in the market,” per CoinDesk’s 6 May 2026 report. He argued that a diversified fund would typically spread custody across multiple prime-broker-style relationships rather than one. CoinDesk noted that custody arrangements have grown somewhat more varied even so: Fidelity keeps FBTC’s bitcoin with its own affiliate, Fidelity Digital Assets; VanEck’s HODL started out with Gemini before adding Coinbase as well; BlackRock’s IBIT pairs Anchorage with Coinbase; and Morgan Stanley’s proposed bitcoin ETF names Coinbase Custody together with BNY.
Adding Anchorage as a second custodian is sometimes read as BlackRock shifting bitcoin away from Coinbase. Decrypt’s reporting on the April 2025 filing says the opposite: BlackRock had no plan to move existing funds and can decide the split at its sole discretion, meaning the practical allocation between the two custodians may not change at all. A related misreading treats IBIT shares as equivalent to owning segregated, insured bitcoin. The news.bitcoin.com report’s account of the prospectus risk factors makes clear that shareholders hold a beneficial interest in a trust, not a direct claim on specific coins, that retail shareholders cannot redeem shares directly for bitcoin, and that only authorized participants can create or redeem in bulk — so secondary-market liquidity depends on those firms continuing to arbitrage the price.
No SEC filing was reviewed directly for this page. Every custody detail and structural claim here traces through newsroom reporting on those filings, not the filings themselves, so nuance or later amendments could be missed. One source used in this piece appears at the URL cryptonews.net, but its own byline and dateline identify it as a news.bitcoin.com article from 17 July 2026; this page attributes those claims to news.bitcoin.com accordingly rather than to the hosting domain. The current split of IBIT’s bitcoin between Coinbase and Anchorage is not publicly disclosed anywhere in the evidence available, and BlackRock can alter it without notice. This page cannot give a single, current AUM figure for IBIT: the $70.7 billion figure (SoSoValue data via CoinDesk, 29 November 2025) and the $48 billion figure (BlackRock’s own disclosure via news.bitcoin.com, 15 July 2026) are different measurements on different dates and are not interchangeable or averageable. The sponsor-fails and custodian-fails scenarios described above are drawn from prospectus-style disclosure and outside legal analysis reported by news.bitcoin.com; no major spot bitcoin ETF sponsor or primary custodian has actually failed since the category launched in January 2024, so none of this has been tested in practice. Finally, it is not established from the evidence here whether the risk language news.bitcoin.com summarizes is specific to IBIT’s own prospectus or a generalized synthesis across multiple issuers’ filings.
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
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