State Of Wisconsin Dumped Entire Spot Bitcoin ETF Stake Amid Tariff Uncertainty

Wisconsin’s investment board saw fit to offload its entire Bitcoin (BTC) bet during the first quarter of the year, weeks before President Trump’s economic tariffs sparked a crypto market downturn.

Wisconsin Liquidated Over $300 Million Worth Of BlackRock’s IBIT 

The State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB), which oversees the state’s retirement funds, no longer owns shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

According to a Thursday 13F filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the fiscal quarter ending in March, the Wisconsin Investment Board quietly unloaded all 6,060,351 IBIT shares it reported holding from the previous quarter. At the time, the over 6 million IBIT shares were worth around $335.9 million.

The SWIB in 2024 became the first of its kind to report a Bitcoin ETF purchase, acquiring $164 million worth of BTC exchange-traded funds in Q1 2024 — the same quarter the Bitcoin products went live in the US.

The fund’s mass sell-off of its IBIT shares comes against the backdrop of increasing market uncertainty sparked by a slew of U.S. tariffs that unnerved global trade and risk assets.

Notably, the filing’s deadline, March 31, came just two days before President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ on April 2, 2025, when the U.S. imposed sweeping tariffs affecting almost all its major trading partners.

BlackRock’s IBIT Has Been On A Roll

IBIT remains the market’s biggest spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund by assets under management at approximately $65 billion. The fund extended its dominance by registering an impressive 20-day streak of positive flows. Net inflows for the BlackRock-issued product crossed the $45.5 billion milestone on May 14 after drawing in $232.9 million in investor money.

While the State of Wisconsin was selling, Mubadala Investment Company, one of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds, boosted its BlackRock Bitcoin ETF holdings, signaling sustained institutional interest in crypto-related assets despite recent market volatility.

In its 13F filing with the SEC on Thursday, Mubadala Investment Company revealed that it had added 491,439 shares of BlackRock’s IBIT during Q1, currently worth roughly $29 million. The BTC ETF purchase in Q1 pushed its total IBIT holdings to 8,726,972 as of March 31 from 8,235,533 at the end of December.

As ZyCrypto recently reported, Goldman Sachs is currently the biggest holder of IBIT with 30.8 million shares, worth around $1.4 billion as of March 31.