Bitcoin is down 43% from its October record near $126,000. Altcoins have been hammered even harder. And yet, the money keeps showing up.
U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $180 million on March 13, according to flow trackers, with BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) grabbing $144 million of that—about 80 cents of every dollar. That was day five in a row of positive flows, which by ETF standards counts as a winning streak.
Spot ether ETFs added another $26.7 million the same day. BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) was again the biggest buyer at $32.4 million, more than offsetting small redemptions from rival funds.
January and February were brutal: bitcoin ETFs bled $4.5 billion in net redemptions. Then on March 2, investors poured $521 million back in, breaking a five-week outflow streak. They haven't stopped buying since.
Perhaps the bigger story is what happened on March 12. BlackRock launched ETHB, a staked ethereum ETF that immediately gathered more than $100 million in assets and traded $15.5 million in volume on its first day.
ETHB charges a promotional fee of 0.12% on its first $2.5 billion in assets and offers investors roughly 3.1% annually in staking rewards on top of price appreciation. Coinbase Prime handles the staking, with about 82% of gross rewards passed through to shareholders.
"Some investors who already hold ether directly were staking it and weren't ready to move into an exchange-traded product because they would lose that feature," Jay Jacobs, BlackRock's U.S. head of equity ETFs, told CoinDesk. ETHB removes that obstacle.
BlackRock's crypto ETF franchise keeps growing around it. IBIT has taken in $62.9 billion in cumulative net inflows since its January 2024 launch, per Phemex data, making it one of the most successful ETF launches in history. ETHA holds roughly $6.5 billion. Together with ETHB, BlackRock now runs three spot crypto ETFs and commands the largest share of the roughly $93 billion U.S. bitcoin ETF market.
The inflow streak is notable given the timing. Bitcoin has pulled back from its January highs amid geopolitical tensions and macroeconomic uncertainty. Altcoins have fared worse, with several major tokens down 30% or more from recent peaks.
Yet institutional money keeps flowing into bitcoin and ether ETFs. That divergence, retail retreating from speculative altcoins while institutions accumulate the two largest cryptocurrencies, reflects a market that is splitting along risk lines.
Bitwise Europe head of research Andre Dragosch has been emphatic. "2026 is going to be an amazing year for bitcoin and cryptoassets," Dragosch said, predicting "an aggressive increase in net inflows into bitcoin ETFs" as major wealth managers like Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Vanguard open distribution channels to their advisory clients.
What comes next
The ETF flow data arrives as the product menu keeps expanding. Beyond ETHB, issuers have filed for spot ETFs tracking XRP, Solana, and multi-asset crypto baskets. Galaxy Digital projects net inflows into U.S. spot crypto ETFs will exceed $50 billion this year, more than double the $23 billion that flowed in during 2025.
Five days of inflows do not make a trend. But the pattern is hard to ignore: when prices fall, institutional money is flowing in through ETFs, not out. And the firm doing the most buying is BlackRock, whose CEO Larry Fink called bitcoin "an index of money laundering" in 2017. Today it runs three spot crypto funds and controls the largest slice of a $93 billion market.