BlockBeats news: On February 13, Robert Mitchnick, Global Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, stated yesterday at the Bitcoin Investor Week 2026 event that institutional investors, sovereign nations, and banks are buying Bitcoin on dips.
In addition, Mitchnick clarified the speculation that “IBIT’s hedge fund collapse triggered the Bitcoin price drop,” stating that there is a misconception that hedge funds are causing turbulence in the ETF and creating Bitcoin volatility by selling off. “But what we’ve observed is not the case. Last week, the Bitcoin market was clearly volatile, but when we examined the data for IBIT (BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF), total redemptions from the fund amounted to only 0.2%. If large hedge funds were aggressively closing out their arbitrage positions in the ETF, you would have seen billions of dollars in outflows. Instead, we did see billions of dollars in liquidations on these leveraged perpetual futures platforms—yet IBIT remained remarkably stable, with an investor base that more closely resembles long-term buy-and-hold holders.”