Strategy and Blackrock's IBIT together hold 1,653,222.42 BTC worth roughly $140.82 billion, nearly 8% of Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap. The two piles are nearly equal in size, but one sits in a corporate treasury while the other backs shares in an ETF trust — a structural gap that changes what an outflow from either one actually means.
Strategy's 848,000 BTC is a company record, built after its latest purchase added 334 BTC for $28.7 million at an average $85,838.80 per coin. Blackrock's IBIT holds 805,222.42 BTC, leaving just 42,777.58 BTC between the two piles. At $85,179 per coin on Monday, Strategy's stash is worth about $72.23 billion and IBIT's roughly $68.59 billion.
Two different machines
Strategy reports an aggregate acquisition cost of about $63.97 billion and an average purchase price of $75,440.70 — meaning its holdings now sit roughly $8.26 billion above that cost. IBIT's balance, by contrast, has not actually set a new record: the trust topped 806,000 BTC earlier this year in April and held 805,466.7097 BTC on Oct. 13, 2025, so today's figure sits close to but below that prior high.
IBIT is a Delaware statutory trust whose investors own fractional beneficial interests in its net assets, rather than the bitcoin itself. Coinbase Custody Trust Company is its primary custodian, with Anchorage Digital Bank added in April 2025. Strategy, meanwhile, spreads its holdings across Coinbase Custody, Anchorage Digital and Fidelity Digital Assets, and keeps full board control over its treasury with no shareholder exchange mechanism.
Why an IBIT outflow isn't necessarily a sale
IBIT creates and redeems shares through 40,000-share Baskets, and only a short list of Authorized Participants — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Jane Street Capital, BofA Securities, UBS Securities and Virtu Americas — can deal directly with the trust. A smaller subset of those, Jane Street Capital, Virtu Americas, JPMorgan Securities and Marex Capital Markets, hold agreements for in-kind bitcoin creations and redemptions, a mechanism the SEC enabled when it approved in-kind transactions for crypto exchange-traded products on July 29, 2025.
That matters because a cash redemption can force IBIT to sell bitcoin to return cash to an investor, but an in-kind redemption lets bitcoin leave the trust without a market sale — the coins simply change hands. IBIT's annual sponsor fee of 0.25% can also be satisfied using bitcoin, so the amount of BTC backing each share gradually declines over time.
Strategy decides what happens to its treasury. IBIT moves bitcoin through institutions operating its creation-and-redemption machine. The two piles sit within 42,777.58 BTC of each other, but the mechanics behind them run on entirely separate tracks.
Source: Bitcoin.com News
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