• BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust saw a $1.29 billion dark pool block trade on Tuesday, one of the largest Bitcoin exchange-traded fund transactions on record.

• Bloomberg analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas confirmed the trade, with Balchunas saying the market “absorbed it well.”

• The trade renewed debate over Wall Street’s growing role in Bitcoin, with the founder of Crucible Capital arguing that Bitcoin exchange-traded funds are not improving Bitcoin’s real-world utility.

A massive $1.29 billion block sale in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) crossed Nasdaq on Tuesday, marking what analysts described as one of the largest institutional Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) trades ever recorded.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas confirmed that the trade involved roughly 29.2 million IBIT shares executed around 10:30 am on Tuesday at nearly $43.16 per share through a dark pool transaction that drew immediate attention across crypto and exchange-traded fund markets. Balchunas said the market “absorbed it well” despite the huge size of the order.

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Dark pool trades are privately negotiated transactions executed outside public exchanges, used by institutional investors to move large blocks of shares without immediately impacting market prices or revealing trading intentions to the market.

The trade quickly drew reactions from analysts. Galaxy Digital (GLXY) Head of Research, Alex Thorn, described the transaction as the “biggest such trade” he had ever seen, while crypto analyst Axel Adler Jr. characterized it as a “large-scale institutional de-risking” event unfolding through BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust’s price was flat during pre-market trading hours on Wednesday. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around IBIT stayed in the ‘bearish’ zone, while chatter around it stayed in the ‘normal’ zone over the past day.

The record IBIT trade comes amid growing criticism from longtime crypto industry figures who argue that spot Bitcoin ETFs are reshaping Bitcoin into a traditional financial asset rather than expanding its real-world utility.

In a conversation with Fox Business on Monday, Crucible Capital founder Meltem Demirors argued that “crypto is getting colonized,” criticizing the influence asset managers now hold over Bitcoin markets. Demirors argued that BlackRock “making billions of dollars off an ETF isn’t helping Bitcoin,” adding that packaging BTC into ETFs has done little to make the network itself more useful or accessible.