Abu Dhabi Keeps Its Bitcoin ETF Shares — Even After a $118M Drop

Two big Abu Dhabi players didn’t blink when Bitcoin’s ETF took a hit — they simply held on. By June 30, Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council still owned the same number of BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) shares they had three months earlier, even though the value of those shares slid sharply during the quarter.

They kept every share — and the paper loss

Together the two sovereign investors held 22.94 million IBIT shares at the end of June. That position was worth roughly $764 million after the quarter, down from about $881.4 million at the end of March — so roughly $118 million of value was wiped out while the share counts stayed put.

Mubadala’s stake accounted for 14,721,917 of those shares and fell in reported value from about $565.6 million to around $490.1 million. ADIC held 8,218,712 shares, which were worth roughly $273.6 million on June 30 and represented the largest U.S.-listed holding in its reported 13F portfolio.

Those unchanged positions stand in contrast to other institutions that used the downturn as a chance to trim exposure. For example, some big investors cut their IBIT holdings significantly, while Mubadala had actually increased its stake earlier in the year and ADIC simply sat tight.

Why keep calm and carry on?

There are a few reasons sovereign funds might shrug at a headline-sized pullback. First, regulatory filings (Form 13F) only show certain U.S.-listed holdings — they don’t reveal any Bitcoin that might be tucked away in cold storage. So the ETF numbers can be just one piece of a larger picture.

Second, Abu Dhabi has been building a long-term playbook around digital assets: regulation, investment programs, tokenization experiments and ecosystem funding have all been on the agenda. Examples include major institutional investments tied to the emirate, large-scale programs to support Web3 startups, and moves by state-linked players to tokenize private-market strategies across different chains. That all points to thinking of crypto as part of the financial infrastructure rather than a one-night trade.

Bottom line: while the IBIT line on a spreadsheet lost value during the quarter, these investors appear to be playing a multi-move game — one where holding through the wobble looks like a feature, not a bug.