IBIT's fast rise to $100 billion echoes gold's 2011 top
Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas says IBIT's sprint past $100 billion resembles GLD's 2011 run, right before gold entered a multiyear drawdown.
BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) crossed $100 billion in assets faster than almost any ETF in history. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas is drawing a direct line from that milestone to SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) in 2011, the last time a single-asset commodity fund hit that mark with the same kind of velocity, right before gold spent years grinding lower.
The comparison by the numbers
GLD reached roughly $70 billion in assets in 2011, at the time making it briefly the largest ETF in the US by some measures, as gold prices peaked near $1,900 an ounce that September. What followed was a drawdown of more than 40% from that peak that stretched across most of the following four years, with gold not reclaiming its 2011 highs until 2020. IBIT, launched in January 2024, took roughly 18 months to pass $100 billion, according to Balchunas's comparison reported by The Block, a pace that outstrips GLD's own record-setting climb relative to its underlying asset's market history. Both funds share the same structural feature: they are the dominant on-ramp for institutional capital into a hard-to-value, non-yielding asset, which means fund flows and price action move in the same direction with no coupon or dividend to cushion a reversal.
What the parallel actually argues
The read here isn't that bitcoin is doomed to repeat gold's chart. It's that spot ETFs turn an asset into something more exposed to flow-driven boom and bust, not less. Before GLD, gold ownership was scattered across bars, coins, and mining shares with no single vehicle to track. GLD concentrated demand, amplified the rally, and then amplified the unwind when allocators rotated out. IBIT has done the same thing for bitcoin in a fraction of the time, pulling in pension funds, RIAs, and model portfolios that had no prior mechanism to hold the asset. That concentration is a feature during the up move and a liability on the way down, because the same wrapper that made buying easy makes selling just as frictionless. Balchunas's point, as characterized in the report, is that "spectacular gains" and "painful drawdowns" are two sides of the same structural coin, and a fund hitting $100 billion this fast has by definition absorbed a wave of buyers who weren't there for the previous cycle's pain. Those buyers are the ones most likely to head for the door first when sentiment turns, which is exactly what happened to GLD holders between 2011 and 2015.
What would confirm or break the parallel
The clean test is what happens to IBIT's asset base the next time bitcoin drops 30% or more from a peak. GLD's AUM fell alongside gold's price for years because outflows compounded the price decline rather than offsetting it. If IBIT sees sustained net redemptions during bitcoin's next serious drawdown, rather than the buy-the-dip inflows that have characterized 2024 and 2025, the gold comparison holds. If instead IBIT holders behave more like long-duration allocators who add on weakness, the analogy breaks and bitcoin's ETF era looks structurally different from gold's. Flow data during the next 20-30% drawdown will settle it either way.