Bitcoin ETFs Lose $4.5B in 2026 as IBIT ETF and BTC-USD Face a Risk-Off Stress Test

Bitcoin ETF Flows: From Record Demand To A $4.5B Stress Test

BTC-USD And IBIT Snapshot: Where The Market Stands Now

Spot Bitcoin (BTC-USD) is locked around $67,000–$68,000, almost 47% below the peak above $126,000. At the same time IBIT, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF on Nasdaq, closed at $38.42, up 0.92% on the session, with after-hours trading nudging it to $38.48. The intraday range sat between $37.72 and $38.61, while the 52-week range runs from $35.30 to $71.82. Average daily volume near 75.35M shares keeps IBIT one of the deepest, most liquid ways to hold spot Bitcoin through a regulated wrapper.

Behind that product sits a manager posting $7.01B of annual revenue, $1.13B net income, a net margin of 16.08%, and cash and short-term investments of $12.60B. Equity of $61.86B and a return on capital around 8% tell you the sponsor has the balance sheet to keep the ETF ecosystem properly funded even through aggressive redemptions. That matters when you use IBIT as your regulated gateway to BTC-USD.

Five Weeks, $3.8B Out, $4.5B YTD: How Severe Is The Bitcoin ETF Drain?

Since late January, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have logged five straight weeks of net outflows of roughly $3.8B. Extend the window to the first eight weeks of 2026 and the bleed reaches about $4.5B, offset by only $1.8B of inflows concentrated in the first and third weeks of the year.

The single worst week in that run pulled around $1.49B out of the complex. The most recent week alone saw about $315.9M leave Bitcoin ETFs. Ether vehicles mirror the pressure, with about $123.3M of weekly outflows and five consecutive red weeks of their own. This is not a one-day wobble; it is a sustained, systematic reduction in listed Bitcoin exposure by large allocators.

Cumulative Inflows Still North Of $50B: Structural Footprint Is Intact

Despite the $4.5B YTD outflow and the $3.8B five-week drain, spot Bitcoin ETFs are still sitting on roughly $53–54B of net inflows since launch. At their peak in October 2025, cumulative inflows were closer to $63B; the current pullback has trimmed about $9–10B off that high, not erased the structure.

Total spot ETF assets around $85B account for roughly 6.3% of Bitcoin’s market capitalization. When these products launched, early projections talked about $5–15B of inflows over the first year. Reality overshot that by a factor of three to four. Even after the current shakeout, the footprint remains several times larger than the original bull cases that justified building IBIT and its peers.

BlackRock And IBIT: Dominant Flow Engine, Now Also The Biggest Seller

On weekly flow breakdowns, BlackRock’s IBIT is both the anchor and the swing factor. For Bitcoin ETFs, BlackRock controls about 96% of net volume. In Ethereum ETFs, its share is roughly 83.7%. That concentration means one firm’s risk decisions can tilt the entire flow picture.

Over the latest week, IBIT was the largest seller, with around $303.5M of net outflows. Over the past five weeks, IBIT alone has shed roughly $2.1B, while Fidelity’s FBTC saw about $954M walk out. When the largest holder of spot BTC-USD through regulated vehicles trims risk, the flow data bleeds red across the board.

At the same time, IBIT previously became the fastest ETF in history to cross roughly $70B in assets. The product is still the primary doorway for traditional desks reallocating into or out of Bitcoin. That combination—huge dominance and recent selling—explains why you’ve seen five straight weeks of net outflows without a structural collapse of the wrapper.

Laurore Ltd: A $436M Offshore Whale Inside IBIT

The 13F filing for Laurore Ltd shows how concentrated some of the capital sitting inside IBIT really is. As of December 31, 2025, Laurore held 8,786,279 IBIT shares, valued then at about $436.24M. At an early-2026 share price near $38, that stake drops toward $334M, implying an unrealized drawdown of roughly $102M if the position has not changed.

Laurore is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and lists a Hong Kong office address. It has no public operating history, no diversified 13F portfolio, and no website footprint. One ETF, one position, sole voting control. That translates into synthetic exposure to roughly 4,900–5,000 BTC via IBIT.

This kind of entity functions like an embedded whale within the ETF share register. It is not a classic corporate insider, but it is a concentrated holder whose behavior can affect flows and secondary liquidity. The position also highlights how offshore and Asia-linked capital can route into BTC-USD through U.S. vehicles, even when direct spot access is constrained at home.

Flows Across BTC, ETH And SOL ETFs: Rotation, Not Total Exit

The same weekly breakdown that shows a $315.9M net outflow for Bitcoin ETFs also reveals a more nuanced picture across the crypto ETF stack. Ethereum funds lost about $123.3M on the week, again with BlackRock as the heaviest seller (~$102M) and a much smaller 21Shares product adding only around $0.7M.

Yet Solana ETFs recorded a +$13.9M net inflow, led by Bitwise adding roughly $11.7M to their SOL exposure. All major Solana funds either held steady or added, with none showing net weekly redemptions. In other words, capital is not fleeing the entire digital asset complex; it is rotating. BTC-USD and ETH see de-risking, while a smaller, high-beta asset like Solana absorbs fresh money through ETF wrappers.

For you, that means the ETF channel is still active and selective. The cool-off is centered on Bitcoin and Ethereum, not on the concept of listed crypto exposure itself.

Macro Overlay: Outflows From Bitcoin, Inflows To Gold

The $4.5B YTD outflow from Bitcoin ETFs has to be viewed against the macro backdrop. The U.S. policy mix, tariff headlines, and geopolitical tension have pushed large pools of capital toward classic safety trades. Gold and gold-themed ETFs have attracted roughly $16B of inflows in the last three months alone.

Crypto fear and greed readings around 14—deep in “extreme fear” territory—show how skittish sentiment has become. ETF outflows line up with that picture: capital is sliding from high-volatility exposure like BTC-USD into perceived store-of-value assets that line up better with compliance committees when volatility spikes and policy risk is opaque.

Derivatives: $46B Of Futures OI And A Call-Heavy Options Curve

While ETFs bleed, the derivatives complex around BTC-USD is anything but quiet. Global futures open interest sits around 671,140 BTC, about $45.97B at current prices. At the end of 2025, that figure was above $80B, so leverage has been trimmed from the absolute peak, but remains historically elevated.

CME leads with about 122,470 BTC in futures OI (~$8.38B), roughly 18.2% of the market. Binance follows with around 116,190 BTC ($7.96B), with OKX at 46,600 BTC ($3.19B). Other venues like Bybit, Gate and MEXC add multi-billion stacks of their own. Many of them posted 24-hour OI growth between 2% and 10%, signalling ongoing appetite for leverage even as spot chops sideways.

Options positioning leans bullish in structure if not in immediate direction. Total call open interest is roughly 283,457 BTC versus about 219,726 BTC in puts—around a 56%/44% split. Calls expiring in late February around the $75,000 strike (8,342.9 BTC notional) and protective puts around $40,000 (7,375.6 BTC) define the short-term risk band. Further out, large call clusters sit at $80,000, $90,000, and even $120,000 strikes into March and December.

Max-pain levels around $80,000–$85,000 on Deribit and OKX, with Binance showing a curve peaking closer to $120,000 then sliding toward ~$90,000, tell you where option sellers would prefer BTC-USD to gravitate into expiry. With spot still under $70,000, the options surface leans toward upside magnet levels even as ETFs are in redemption mode.

Bitcoin Price Action: Sideways Around $67K Under A Heavy Macro Ceiling

On the tape, BTC-USD has been range-bound. Intraday ranges like $67,563–$68,636 define sessions where futures and options turnover is heavy, but closing prices barely move. The spot drawdown from the peak above $126,000 is near 47%. Junking 40–50% from the high while still holding a $1T-scale market cap is precisely the sort of regime where risk committees start trimming ETF exposure without ditching the asset outright.

Those same committees see a derivatives market carrying about $46B in futures OI and a call-heavy options complex targeting 80–90k as a medium-term magnet. The price is boxed: macro and ETF outflows cap upside, call skew and high OI keep downside trades from being a one-way path.

DeFi Rotation: Mutuum Finance As A Parallel Risk Channel

While ETF flows tell you how traditional desks are behaving, a different part of the market is rotating into early-stage DeFi projects. Mutuum Finance (MUTM) is one example that currently sits alongside the Bitcoin ETF narrative in research feeds.

Mutuum has a V1 lending and borrowing protocol already live on Sepolia testnet. Users can supply assets and receive mtTokens that accumulate yield, take debt positions tracked by separate tokens, and rely on automated liquidation logic that uses a health-factor to manage risk in real time. The roadmap includes a native overcollateralized stablecoin and multichain deployment to spread liquidity across several networks.

The token structure is in presale at $0.04 with a confirmed launch price of $0.06, implying a built-in 50% step-up for anyone buying the current stage and holding through listing. Out of a 1.82B presale allocation, over 850M tokens have already been sold—almost half the pool.

You are seeing a classic two-track market: regulated vehicles like IBIT are experiencing $4.5B YTD outflows and a five-week $3.8B bleed, while high-beta DeFi plays run discounted presales toward mainnet. Capital that leaves ETFs does not necessarily park in cash; part of it hunts for asymmetric payoff in projects like MUTM with more execution risk but higher theoretical multiple.

Institutional Flows vs Offshore Whales: Who Really Sets The Tone?

Within IBIT, around 384M shares are held by roughly 1,690 entities. Names like Millennium, Jane Street, Susquehanna, Citadel, and sovereign-linked money such as Mubadala appear across the register. Laurore’s 8.79M-share position is a large single line, but it is one line among many.

Institutional desks are the ones driving the $303.5M weekly sell ticket from BlackRock’s flagship ETF and the $2.1B that left IBIT over five weeks. Offshore conduits like Laurore are more static markers of who is willing to stomach a concentrated bet through a regulated wrapper.

For BTC-USD, that mix means your reference price is being set by a blend of transparent ETF flows, large but opaque offshore positions, and a derivatives market that can flip from call-driven grind-up to forced-liquidation cascade when a macro headline hits.

Buy, Sell Or Hold: Positioning Around BTC-USD And IBIT Now

Putting this together:

– Spot BTC-USD is ~47% off its peak, oscillating around $67,000–$68,000.
– Bitcoin ETFs have bled about $4.5B in 2026 and $3.8B over the last five weeks, with IBIT alone losing about $2.1B in that window and a single recent week printing a $315.9M complex-wide outflow.
– Cumulative net inflows are still around $53–54B, total ETF AUM near $85B, roughly 6.3% of Bitcoin’s market cap—far above the $5–15B that would have counted as “success” at launch.
– Derivatives carry ~671k BTC of futures OI ($45.97B) and options skewed 56% toward calls, with big strikes clustered at $75k–$120k and max-pain zones around $80k–$90k.
– Gold has pulled in ~$16B over three months as a competing macro hedge, while Solana ETFs have attracted +$13.9M in a week, showing rotation rather than a full exit from crypto risk.
– Inside IBIT, whales like Laurore Ltd hold $300M+ equivalent positions even after mark-to-market losses, while the sponsor’s balance sheet is strong enough to absorb heavy redemptions.

Given that mix, the stance on BTC-USD and IBIT here is Hold, with room to add on deeper fear rather than chase strength. The structural footprint of ETFs is intact, the outflows are meaningful but not catastrophic versus the $53B-plus still parked in the products, and the derivatives market is positioned for higher levels over the medium term even as macro headwinds drive a short-term de-risking cycle.

You are not looking at a market that has abandoned Bitcoin. You are looking at a market that is repricing risk, rotating between ETF exposure, derivatives, gold, and high-beta DeFi, while still leaving more than $50B in net ETF demand on the table.

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