BlackRock Scrambling to Buy Bitcoin on Bisq As Exchange and OTC Desk Supply Dwindles
Wall Street – BlackRock is scrambling to come up with enough Bitcoin to back it's massively successful new Bitcoin ETF as Bitcoin supply available on exchanges and OTC Desks dwindle despite in-flows remaining steady.
Speculation that BlackRock or some other ETF custodian may be sourcing Bitcoin from Bisq, a decentralized Bitcoin exchange that operates on a peer-to-peer (P2P) model early Wednesday afternoon when a user noticed a buy offer of a whopping 10,696 Bitcoin for $51,200 each for a total value of over $547 million. "Typically people are looking to buy .05 or .1 Bitcoin at a time on Bisq. Sometimes a whole coin but never TEN THOUSAND or more Bitcoin!" a p2p maximalist on Stacker News commented.
After rumors spilled over into X, Bloomberg journalists made some calls and discovered that it was, in fact, BlackRock behind the Bisq bid. A BlackRock spokesman told The Bugle the asset manager was doing everything in its power to comply with regulation and laws regarding balancing its Bitcoin ETF, including using what the spokesman called "shadowy decentralized exchanges." As of press time its not clear if BlackRock was able to source the 10,696 Bitcoin it needed at the time of the offer or if they sourced Bitcoin by other means.
On a related note, conversation overheard at the popular Bitcoin bar in New York City, Pubkey, from three presumed BlackRock employees close to the Bitcoin ETF's daily operations, indicates the Wall Street suits were very impressed with the so-called shadowy exchange. One suit who was telling everyone in the bar how he went to Wharton said he liked that there was no KYC requirement or need to jump through stupid regulatory hoops just to get this open source asset outside the traditional banking system.
