Bitcoin’s recent struggle to sustain the $100,000 level has once again raised the familiar question of whether institutional demand will persist.
However, BlackRock has come to the opposite conclusion in a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that despite the short-term market downturn, its belief in Bitcoin’s long-term relevance remains intact.
The company frames Bitcoin as a decades-long structural theme shaped by the adoption curve, depth of liquidity, and declining trust in traditional monetary systems.
While acknowledging volatility, this view argues that Bitcoin’s strategic value is accelerating faster than its price indicates. This tone stands in contrast to markets, where each pullback often renews questions about the durability of the system.
The contradiction of slowing prices and increasing institutional demand
A central pillar of BlackRock’s argument is Bitcoin’s network growth profile, which he describes as one of the fastest growing in modern technology cycles.
The filing cites adoption estimates that show Bitcoin had more than 300 million users worldwide some 12 years after its launch, surpassing mobile phones and the early internet, which took much longer to reach similar standards.
For BlackRock, this curve is more than just a data point. This reframes Bitcoin as a long-term asset whose value reflects cumulative network participation rather than monthly price fluctuations.
The company also includes a 10-year performance matrix that shows that despite wild fluctuations in individual years, where Bitcoin often ranks at the top or bottom of annual return tables, its cumulative and annualized performance still outperforms stocks, gold, commodities, and bonds.
This framework positions volatility as a cost built into exposure rather than a structural flaw.
For asset managers who design their products for multi-decade asset allocations rather than short-cycle momentum trading, the temporary pause looks less like a warning and more like a familiar feature of Bitcoin’s cyclical rhythm.
The filing also highlights that the current slowdown in assets has not inhibited institutional investor participation. Rather, BlackRock argues that Bitcoin’s underlying fundamentals, including digital adoption, macroeconomic uncertainty, and expanding regulated market infrastructure, continue to strengthen despite the cooling spot price.
How IBIT changed the Bitcoin market structure
The second theme in the filing is the claim that BlackRock’s own product, the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), has reshaped access to assets in a way that supports deeper institutional engagement.
The company emphasizes three areas including simplifying exposure, enhancing liquidity, and integrating regulated custody and pricing rails.
BlackRock said IBIT reduces operational friction by allowing institutions to hold Bitcoin through a structure they already understand.
The company says it removes custody risks, key management issues, and technical onboarding that have previously been barriers for financial institutions in favor of traditional payment channels.
At the same time, BlackRock also highlighted liquidity as one of the most significant impacts IBIT has had on the market.
Since its launch, this product has been the most actively traded Bitcoin ETF, contributing to narrower spreads and a stronger order book. For large allocators, execution quality serves as a form of validation. In other words, the more liquid a product becomes, the more institutionally acceptable the underlying asset becomes.
Additionally, BlackRock also highlighted its multi-year infrastructure work with Coinbase Prime, regulated price benchmarks, and rigorous audit framework as evidence that Bitcoin exposure can be delivered on a comparable basis to stocks and bonds.
Thanks to this design, the company has processed over $3 billion in in-kind remittances. The company says this is a sign of the institution’s and the whale’s confidence in its storage structure.
In particular, the IBIT flow enhances all of the above points. Since its inception, IBIT has emerged as the leading Bitcoin ETF product on the market, with cumulative net inflows of $64.45 billion and assets under management of over $80 billion.
In fact, IBIT has seen more inflows this year than all 10 other Bitcoin products on the market combined, according to data from K33 Research.
Bitcoin as a global currency alternative
The strongest part of the application calls it a “global currency alternative.” BlackRock describes Bitcoin as a rare decentralized asset that is positioned to benefit from continued geopolitical turmoil, rising debt burdens, and a secular decline in the credibility of fiat currencies.
Although the company does not see Bitcoin as a direct replacement for sovereign currencies, the implications are clear that the asset will become more relevant as traditional monetary systems face stress.
BlackRock also positions Bitcoin within a broader technology transition. Bitcoin, the most widely adopted cryptocurrency, serves as a proxy bet against the mainstreaming of digital asset infrastructure such as blockchain-based payments, settlement systems, and financial market rails.
In this context, Bitcoin has two intertwined identities as a financial hedge and a technological exposure.
This dual narrative helps explain BlackRock’s continued bullishness. One of the pillars of the paper is macroeconomics, linked to inflation dynamics, fiscal trajectories, and geopolitical fragmentation. The other is structural and relates to the ongoing global expansion of blockchain networks.
With this in mind, the recent lackluster price movements do not significantly disrupt either theory.