If you hold bitcoin yourself, the practical worry is who can move it when something goes wrong: an exchange account, a wallet that stays online, or keys only you can recover. Reporting from November 10, 2026 describes how some larger holders had been answering that question by turning coins they already held into ETF shares. What follows is that report, not a later update.
What BlackRock said it had recorded
BlockBeats, citing Barron’s, reported comments from Robbie Mitchnick, head of BlackRock’s digital-asset business. He said that since regulators had approved in-kind creation and redemption of crypto assets the previous year, BlackRock had recorded about $3.6 billion of directly held bitcoin converted into shares of its spot bitcoin ETF, IBIT.
That sum is what the firm had recorded, not a full market total. Mitchnick said BlackRock does not process every transaction itself and may not see every conversion, so the actual scale could be larger. The report did not give a higher confirmed figure.
BlackRock also offers in-kind conversion for the iShares Ethereum Trust ETF and the iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF. Those amounts were described as far smaller than IBIT’s.
Mitchnick said demand was still rising and stood at the highest level of interest the company had seen, and that this interest did not change with moves in the bitcoin price.
The motive he named, and what it does not settle
He called security and peace of mind the single largest motive. Outsourcing custody to an institutional-grade cold-storage model, he said, was more attractive for holders. Shares in an ETF run by a large asset manager, he added, are generally viewed as lower risk than assets left on a crypto trading platform or in a hot wallet that stays online.
He pointed to a then-recent hack of Binance as a further reminder of exchange risk, while noting that large bitcoin holders already understood those risks. This report did not state a confirmed loss for that incident, so the hack is context he cited, not a quantified loss here.
The trade-off is who controls the asset, not a setup that removes all risk. Direct bitcoin can be moved by whoever can sign with the keys. An IBIT share is a fund holding, not a key you keep, so an in-kind conversion gives up the ability to spend those coins yourself. It does not erase fund, intermediary, or market risk.
It is also not a personal backup. A backup has three separate aims: accessibility (you can still use the recovery material), confidentiality (others cannot read it), and redundancy (more than one independent copy). Converting coins into ETF shares does none of those; it replaces direct key control with a fund share.
Who sets the minimum size
The minimum for an in-kind conversion had fallen from an initial level of about $30 million to about $1 million to $2 million. Mitchnick said that floor is set by the intermediaries that arrange the trades—Galaxy Digital, Talos, and Virtu. He said he hoped it could one day fall to a single ETF share, but that the cost structure would be hard to bring to zero in the near term.
The check this report actually supports is narrow. Ask whether a conversion is available at your size, which intermediary sets that minimum, and whether you would be keeping direct keys or accepting a fund share instead. The $3.6 billion is a recorded amount that may be incomplete, and the security case is Mitchnick’s stated reason, not evidence that every other form of custody has failed.
Original report: BlockBeats, November 10, 2026, 15:25 (UTC+8), citing Barron’s.
