BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robert Mitchnick, announced that the company has lowered the minimum threshold for exchanging fund shares for actual BTC from $25 million to $1 million.
Now, investors with as little as $1 million in BTC can carry out such an exchange through authorized participants and receive IBIT shares.
Mitchnick noted that the process remains intermediary-based; BlackRock does not work directly with individual investors.
He described the Coldcard wallet hack as “a fairly simple and amateurish mistake,” rather than a problem with the BTC network itself, and pointed out that such incidents highlight the advantage of regulated ETFs, which eliminate the need for investors to hold private keys themselves.
According to Mitchnick, BTC-ETF holders are primarily long-term investors, and BlackRock has not observed any signs of panic amid the decline from October’s peak.