At Bitwise’s Bitcoin Normal Companies Investors Day, MicroStrategy govt chairman Michael Saylor set an audacious marker for your complete exchange-traded fund panorama, declaring that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Belief (ticker: IBIT) will turn into “the biggest ETF in the world in ten years.” The comment immediately rippled by way of the ETF neighborhood, the place practitioners are well-aware that the present asset-class hierarchy is dominated by broad-based fairness funds moderately than single-asset autos.
IBIT already occupies a rarefied tier inside digital-asset finance: based on Bitcoin Treasuries, the belief now custodies greater than 575,000 BTC, an estimated $54.3 billion. That asset haul locations it as the all-time ETF launch in historical past.
Will Bitcoin Make BlackRock’s ETF The World’s Largest?
Skepticism, nevertheless, was swift—and data-driven. “Just for some context on this… Largest ETF, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) has taken in over $51 bil just this year. IBIT’s total assets = $54 bil. Would be [a] Herculean feat for IBIT,” wrote Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Retailer and host of ETF Prime, in a put up on X. Geraci’s framing underscores the magnitude of the hole: VOO’s $51 billion of 2025 internet inflows alone practically matches IBIT’s whole asset base.
Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas provided a equally tempered outlook. “I would never say never re IBIT bc it broke every conceivable record its rookie year but… King VOO is curr 10x bigger and hauls in 5x more cash every day = would take a flat or negative decade for US stocks while btc moons,” he posted, pointing to the entrenched scale and relentless money technology of the Vanguard fund.
Balchunas elaborated that for IBIT to shut the hole organically it will want “well north of $1 b/day, like $3 b or $4 b/day if it hopes to gain ground,” concluding that “some extraordinary sht would have to… happen but it’s poss.” When requested whether or not buyers would possibly take up bitcoin’s “perfect savings” narrative extra quickly, Balchunas distilled his reply to “Two words, two syllables: cash flow,” highlighting the gravitational pull that dividend and earnings streams exert on portfolio development.
Saylor’s forecast lands in a market atmosphere already primed by BlackRock chief govt Larry Fink’s personal headline-grabbing Bitcoin thesis. On 22 January 2025, throughout a World Financial Discussion board panel in Davos, Fink informed Bloomberg that widespread institutional allocation—“2% or even 5%” of portfolios, he stated, citing a latest dialogue with a sovereign wealth fund—may propel Bitcoin to “$500,000, $600,000, $700,000 per Bitcoin.”
Describing the asset as a “currency of fear,” Fink argued that Bitcoin’s borderless design supplies a hedge in opposition to “the debasement of your currency, or the economic or political stability of your country.”
For Saylor, whose corporate-treasury Bitcoin technique has made Technique a leveraged proxy on the token’s value, Fink’s framing presents macro-level validation: if sovereign wealth funds observe by way of on exploratory conversations, demand may eclipse the finite provide captured inside IBIT. The query—posed implicitly by Geraci’s and Balchunas’ numbers—is whether or not that demand can outpace the relentless inflows into fairness index stalwarts throughout a decade wherein world buyers stay wedded to cash-generative, regulation-familiar belongings.
At press time, BTC traded at $93,656.
Featured picture from X @EleanorTerrett, chart from TradingView.com
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