BlackRock: Most Bitcoin Investors Were Crypto Natives

BlackRock's Jay Jacobs says that 75% of investors in its iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) had never owned an ETF before. This challenges the conventional narrative around Bitcoin ETFs, which assumes traditional investors cautiously entering crypto through a familiar wrapper.

Jacobs described it as a 'two-way street', where crypto natives are entering the broader ETF ecosystem through Bitcoin and then staying. Once exposed to IBIT, many investors start buying other BlackRock funds, including the S&P 500 tracker IVV, the artificial intelligence fund BAI, and the gold ETF IAU.

IBIT, launched in January 2024, currently holds 765,936 BTC with $48 billion in assets under management. The 'Great Convergence' framework proposed by BlackRock suggests an accelerating overlap between crypto, decentralized finance (DeFi), and traditional finance that is dissolving the boundaries separating them.

The convergence is visible across multiple dimensions simultaneously, including tokenized real-world assets surging 589% since early 2025 according to Binance Research. Tokenized deposit networks are being built to compete with stablecoins, and pre-IPO perpetual futures volumes have surged from approximately $1 billion in early May to about $22 billion.