Two Abu Dhabi-linked investment vehicles disclosed massive increases in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) in new US filings, indicating that at least part of the region’s sovereign capital used the drawdown at the end of 2025 to add to regulated Bitcoin exposure rather than divest away from it.
Abu Dhabi wealth funds plunge into Bitcoin
According to the latest Form 13F information table filed on Feb. 17, Mubadala Investment Co. reported owning 12,702,323 shares of IBIT worth $630,670,337 as of Dec. 31, 2025. This is a sharp move from the 8,726,972 IBIT shares reported in its last quarterly filing, which assessed the position. $567,253,180 at the time of that report, a 46% increase in the quarter-over-quarter share count.
A separate filing dated February 17 shows that Al Warda Investments owned 8,218,712 shares of IBIT worth $408,059,051 as of December 31. Combined, the two filings put Abu Dhabi-related exposure through IBIT at year-end at just under 21 million shares, worth more than $1 billion.
The setup matters because IBIT has become the cleanest “institutional plumbing” for BTC exposure in US markets: The quarterly 13F tables don’t show when the fund bought, only what it had at the end of the quarter, but they do show who is comfortable wearing the exposure on the regulated wrappers and who is still racking it up.
The timing also coincides with the way BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is describing sovereign involvement in Bitcoin more broadly. Speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December, Fink described the purchases as systematic rather than momentum-driven: “There are a number of sovereign funds that are standing by. They’re adding incrementally at $100,000 at $120,000. I know they’ve bought more at $80,000.”
This quote is working very well into the current market narrative, because it suggests that sovereign demand is not just a major event, it is a laddered allocation process that can also appear during times of stress, even if the public only sees it through later filings.
There is also a subtle but important difference in what the filing means regarding the process. These are not direct BTC custody disclosures. They are disclosures of ETF shares held alongside traditional equities and other liquid instruments within a standard reporting framework. In practice, that option compresses operational friction: custody, execution rails, and governance overhead into a familiar package, which could be decisive for larger allocators that move slowly but steadily in size.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $68,246.
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