Two Abu Dhabi state investment funds have reaffirmed large positions in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, a sign that Gulf sovereign wealth continues to treat Bitcoin as a strategic portfolio asset. Mubadala Investment Company disclosed a $490 million stake in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) — its second-largest single holding across the entire 13F portfolio — while the Abu Dhabi Investment Council reported a $273.6 million IBIT position that is the largest in its book, according to regulatory filings reported by Bitcoin Magazine. Together the two funds hold $763.7 million of the ETF, and both positions are unchanged from the prior quarter.
The disclosure lands against a backdrop of accelerated institutional access to Bitcoin. Since the SEC approved a wave of U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, pension funds, U.S. state treasuries, and sovereign vehicles have been able to gain regulated exposure without custodying coins directly. BlackRock’s IBIT has absorbed more net cash than any other crypto ETF and now commands roughly $47.3 billion in assets under management, according to Bitcoin Magazine, the long-running publication that also distributes its reporting through its App Store and Google Play apps.
A separate thread shows the UAE building Bitcoin exposure through domestic mining rather than seizures. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence earlier this year tied roughly 6,782 bitcoins — about $453.6 million at the time of its analysis — to wallets linked to mining activity associated with the UAE’s Royal Group, per Bitcoin Magazine. That contrasts with the United States, whose sizable reserves largely originated from law enforcement forfeitures.
For readers tracking sovereign adoption, the signal is steady rather than surging: Abu Dhabi’s allocation is deliberate and held, not traded tactically. The same institutional pull is reshaping Bitcoin financial products elsewhere, as in Kraken’s backing of Lombard’s Bitcoin yield shift to 2.5% APY, which shows issuers packaging Bitcoin exposure into yield-bearing structures. Bitcoin’s role as a reserve and portfolio asset keeps widening beyond early corporate treasuries.
