Two Abu Dhabi-linked investment vehicles disclosed sizeable additions to BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) in new US filings, signaling that at least part of the region’s sovereign capital used the late-2025 drawdown to scale regulated Bitcoin exposure rather than step away.
Mubadala Investment Company reported owning 12,702,323 shares of IBIT worth $630,670,337 as of Dec. 31, 2025, according to its latest Form 13F information table filed on Feb. 17. That’s a sharp step up from the 8,726,972 IBIT shares it disclosed in its prior quarter filing, which valued the position at $567,253,180 at the time of that report, a 46% increase in share count quarter-over-quarter.
A separate Feb. 17 filing shows Al Warda Investments reported 8,218,712 shares of IBIT valued at $408,059,051 as of Dec. 31. Combined, the two filings put Abu Dhabi-linked exposure through IBIT at just under 21 million shares at year-end, well over $1 billion.
The setup matters because IBIT has become the cleanest “institutional plumbing” for BTC exposure in US markets: quarterly 13F tables don’t show when a fund bought, only what it held at quarter-end, but they do show who is comfortable wearing the exposure on a regulated wrapper and who is still scaling it.
The timing also lines up with the way BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has been describing sovereign participation in Bitcoin more broadly. Speaking at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December, Fink framed the buying as methodical rather than momentum-driven: “There are a number of sovereign funds that are standing by. They’re adding incrementally at $120,000, at $100,000. I know they bought more at $80,000.”
That quote is doing a lot of work in the current market narrative, because it suggests sovereign demand isn’t just a headline event, it’s a laddered allocation process that can keep showing up during stress, even if the public only sees it later through filings.
There’s also a subtle but important distinction in what the filings imply about the process. These are not disclosures of direct BTC custody. They’re disclosures of ETF shares, held alongside traditional equities and other liquid instruments inside a standard reporting framework. In practice, that choice compresses operational friction: custody, execution rails, and governance overhead into a familiar package, which can be decisive for large allocators that move slowly but move size.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $68,246.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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