On February 13, Robert Mitchnick, Global Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, stated at the Bitcoin Investor Week 2026 event that institutional investors, sovereign nations, and banks are buying Bitcoin on dips.
Furthermore, Mitchnick clarified speculation that the "IBIT hedge fund collapse triggered a Bitcoin crash," stating that there's a misconception that hedge funds were manipulating ETFs to create volatility and sell off Bitcoin. "But that's not what we saw. The Bitcoin market was clearly volatile last week, and we looked at the IBIT (BlackRock Bitcoin ETF) data; the entire fund's redemptions were only 0.2%. If there were a lot of hedge funds aggressively liquidating their arbitrage trades in the ETF, you should have seen billions of dollars outflowing. And we did see billions of dollars in liquidations on these leveraged perpetual contract platforms. The ETF side, however, was very stable; the investor base is more like the long-term buy-and-hold type."
