coindesk.com
Robbie Mitchnick, BlackRock’s (BLK) head of digital assets, is the latest industry expert to voice a strongly bullish macroeconomic outlook for bitcoin $BTC$78,808.48, and investors appear to share that conviction.
Trading volume in the company’s spot bitcoin ETF, IBIT, last week hit a record for any positive week since its debut in January 2024 even as the share price tracked bitcoin’s 23% gain, according to TradingView data.
"[Fiscal] Debt and deficit levels are a major concern for markets,” Mitchnick told CNBC in an interview, adding that when those concerns return to the headlines, it tends to benefit “assets like bitcoin and gold.”
Mitchnick also noted that equities have recently lagged behind bitcoin and gold, while fixed-income markets have been choppy. Against that backdrop, bitcoin’s advance is evidence of its distinct appeal and status as an emerging store of value.
He is not alone in this assessment. A growing number of observers have recently warned about the unsustainable trajectory of U.S. fiscal debt and how it's leading to financial repression, a policy tool that incentivizes capital to flow into hard assets.
BlackRock is uniquely positioned at the center of this narrative as the issuer of the world's largest spot bitcoin ETF, which has attracted $63 billion in investor capital since its inception.
Last week, a total of 439.5 million IBIT shares changed hands as prices surged and investors poured billions more into the spot ETF. The all-time record remains over 700 million shares in the week ended Feb. 6, when $BTC plunged to nearly $60,000, a volume figure that still stands unmatched.
The record volume in a positive week, coupled with strong inflows, highlights heavy, conviction-driven institutional buying rather than short-term speculative or retail-driven activity.
IBIT’s share price surged by 22.59% to $43.68 last week, its best performance since February 2024, with net inflow of $1.33 billion. So far this month, net inflow has climbed to $2.64 billion, the most since October 2025, according to data source SoSoValue.