A $1.3 billion IBIT dark pool sale preceded Bitcoin’s sharpest intraday drop on May 27.
A single trader sold 29.2 million shares of BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) on Tuesday via a dark pool, a private institutional trading venue, generating proceeds of roughly $1.3 billion. The transaction was executed at 2:30 p.m. UTC at $43.16 per share and preceded a rapid decline in BTC, according to analysts who flagged the trade.
Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, said on X that the sale was the largest he had observed on a dark pool. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted the order was more than 22 times larger than the next-biggest IBIT sell order placed that day.
TradingView data showed BTC falling 1.5% from $77,875 to $76,720 in the 10 minutes immediately following the 2:30 p.m. UTC transaction. The token continued lower through the session, touching a 24-hour bottom of $75,600 roughly 12 hours after the trade, representing a 2.8% decline for the day.
Dark pools are private trading platforms that allow institutional investors to execute large orders without immediate public disclosure, reducing the risk of moving market prices during execution. Despite that design, the scale of Tuesday's trade appears to have transmitted into the broader crypto market.
US spot BTC ETFs recorded their eighth consecutive trading day of net outflows on Tuesday, with $333.6 million leaving the funds, including a $192.4 million outflow from IBIT alone. Since May 14, the last day of net inflows across the ETF group, more than $2 billion has exited the products, according to Farside data.
Institutional positioning data has also shifted. Jane Street reduced its BTC ETF holdings by roughly 70% in the first quarter, while Goldman Sachs cut its Bitcoin ETF position by 10% over the same period. BTC has historically been viewed as an asset class that moves independently of traditional markets, but the growth of US-listed ETFs has brought its price into closer correlation with equity market flows and institutional risk sentiment.
The $1.3 billion dark pool transaction represents the first instance of a single IBIT order of that scale being publicly identified and linked to same-session Bitcoin price movement.
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