BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust has had better months — in fact, every other month has been better.
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After suffering its worst November on record, the world’s largest Bitcoin ETF is now staring down a six-week outflow streak that suggests investors are fleeing fast.
Once hailed as the ultimate bridge between Wall Street’s deep pockets and crypto’s boundless promise, BlackRock Inc.’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is suddenly looking more like a monument to fading enthusiasm.
More than $2.7 billion has been pulled from the fund in the five weeks through Nov. 28, with another $113 million yanked on Thursday, Dec. 4, alone, Bloomberg reports.
Bitcoin’s slump reflects a more profound shift
As Bitcoin slides into a bear market and retail froth evaporates, institutions — long expected to be crypto’s stabilizing force — appear to be stepping back as well.
IBIT is enduring its longest withdrawal streak since debuting in January 2024, marking a dramatic reversal from the inflow frenzy that helped propel Bitcoin to record highs earlier this year.
Yes, total assets still exceed a massive $71 billion, but you wouldn’t know it from the mood on trading desks.
Investors extracted $2.2 billion from the ETF in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, FactSet data shows. That’s nearly eight times more than October’s losses and the worst monthly tally in its short history.
Even as Bitcoin has steadied in recent days, the withdrawals continue to flow, suggesting sentiment has turned decisively risk-off.
Bitcoin itself isn’t helping. At around $88,900, it’s also nursing an 8.5% year-to-date loss — a sharp contrast to the S&P 500’s 16% rally in 2025.
According to Bloomberg data, it’s the first time since 2014 that U.S. stocks have surged while Bitcoin has slumped.
Trump boom? More like a whiff
The broader crypto market has shed more than $1 trillion in value since a harsh liquidation wave in early October triggered a prolonged rout. Retail traders, accustomed to the dizzying highs of early 2024, have proven less able to stomach the drop.
Institutions can hold through the pain — but the outflows suggest many are choosing not to.
And for those clinging to the political narrative? The long-promised “Trump boom” for digital assets hasn’t materialized.
Yes, Bitcoin briefly broke $126,000 earlier this year, but the collapse that followed has left the industry reconsidering its assumptions about regulatory relief and institutional adoption.
SkyBridge founder Anthony Scaramucci had this to say on his podcast, “The Rest Is Politics“:
Trump being Trump, he launches two meme coins on the eve of the election. One for him and one for Melania, right? So meme coins again just are like gambling tokens. They have very little value. These meme coins go up in value. He takes [$500] or $600 million out for himself and his family. And these meme coins over the last seven or eight months have crashed in value… It’s just going to be a huge problem for the industry because if you have a president that’s running a self-interested memecoin, which is a worthless token, he’s susceptible to grift and graft. He’s susceptible to people buying the token and then trying to influence him. And lo and behold, Trump says, “Yeah, go buy my token or make a $5 million donation to me and I’ll meet you crypto people at my Virginia Country Club.” And so what this did actually is it soured the industry. It had the opposite effect.
More surprisingly, Bitcoin’s once-reliable correlation with risk assets has evaporated. While AI stocks rocket higher and gold flirts with all-time highs, Bitcoin is marching to its own, decidedly downbeat rhythm.
The question now is whether the BlackRock ETF’s outflows are just a rough patch — or a harbinger of a tougher 2026.
