IBIT's $1.3B block sale weighs on Bitcoin
Bitcoin weakened Tuesday after a dark-pool block sale of roughly $1.3 billion in shares of BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF, iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), according to CoinDesk. BTC was down about 2% on the day and briefly slipped to around $75,850.
CoinDesk also reported that Strategy did not add to its Bitcoin holdings last week, opting instead to buy back convertible debt. The company repurchased $1.5 billion principal amount of 0% coupon convertible notes due 2029, paying about $1.38 billion in cash, an roughly 8% discount to par. Following the transaction, Strategy's U.S. dollar reserves fell to $871 million from $2.25 billion, while outstanding convertible notes declined to $6.7 billion from $8.2 billion. Strategy still holds 843,738 bitcoins.
The report said the deleveraging produced a BTC yield of 0.7%, equivalent in value to about 4,391 additional bitcoins. Management framed the move as an active capital-structure adjustment aimed at easing near-term debt pressure. Market attention has centered on the thinner cash buffer: Strategy has $871 million available for dividend payments and debt service, versus about $1.2 billion in annual dividend and debt obligations tied to STRC and other senior instruments, implying less than one year of coverage without new financing.
IBIT-related selling added to near-term pressure. During the week Strategy paused buying, a trader sold about $1.3 billion of IBIT shares in a single dark-pool transaction, increasing the market's absorption burden. With no comparable large buy orders, BTC softened. CoinDesk noted that on Monday, spot Bitcoin ETFs posted a combined net outflow of $333 million, while spot Ethereum ETFs saw a net outflow of $35 million, with weakening flows and large sell orders amplifying short-term volatility.
Beyond price action, Hyperliquid is moving into prediction markets. The platform is extending its HIP4 results-market system to offer prediction contracts tied to offline real-world events, starting with U.S. inflation data and Federal Reserve rate decisions, entering the same arena as Polymarket and Kalshi. A key difference is settlement: Polymarket uses UMA as an external oracle and resolves outcomes through post-dispute voting, while Hyperliquid relies on its own validators to list markets and adjudicate outcomes, avoiding an external oracle. The setup could allow traders to combine event wagers with positions in BTC or tokenized stocks on the same venue.
CoinDesk also highlighted a recent rotation into AI-related tokens. Over the past seven days, NEAR rose 54%, GRASS gained 67%, RENDER advanced 21%, and Akash climbed 15%. Bitcoin's year-to-date performance remains negative, and price action has largely moved sideways since mid-May. The rally was attributed to rising demand for AI infrastructure, with projects increasingly tied to revenue streams such as compute leasing and bandwidth monetization rather than pure speculation.
Separately, Ondo Finance announced the unexpected death of its founder and CEO, Nathan Allman. President Ian De Bode has assumed the CEO role effective immediately.
