Bitcoin’s recent price action, trading in the mid-$90,000s, has given bulls hope, but the plumbing beneath the market tells a humbler story, as per CryptoQuant’s latest post . The two funds most directly tied to price formation, Fidelity’s FBTC and ARK’s ARKB, are no longer charging upward in the way that lifted Bitcoin last year, and that absence of on-exchange buying power is visible if you look past the headlines. As of mid-January, Bitcoin sits near $95,600, having bounced off recent dips but failing to build the kind of broad, conviction-driven rally that historically needs deep ETF liquidity to sustain.
Fidelity’s FBTC still holds a huge stash of Bitcoin, but the flow profile has flattened; FBTC hasn’t retested the highs it made around March of last year, and on balance, its cumulative flows have stalled. That matters because Bitcoin’s price has tracked the combined flows of FBTC and ARKB with uncanny fidelity since spot ETFs became mainstream. When those two funds stop being steady buyers, market depth thins. Crypto holdings trackers show FBTC holding roughly 202,000 BTC in mid-January, a substantial position, but one that no longer appears to be the engine of fresh demand it once was.
ARK’s ARKB paints an even clearer picture of fading liquidity. After a mid-2025 peak, the fund was above roughly 49k BTC during the summer. ARKB’s balance has been drifting lower into the autumn and winter months, a slow bleed that’s easy to miss unless you follow holdings charts every day. That downward trend reduces a class of marginal demand that, in aggregate with Fidelity’s flows, helped elevate Bitcoin in earlier rallies. Current public holdings estimates put ARKB’s Bitcoin exposure in the neighborhood of the mid-40 thousand, down from its summer highs.
What About BlackRock’s IBIT?
It remains the single most important liquidity source in the ETF universe, and its accumulation has been massive. BlackRock’s trust holds well into the hundreds of thousands of BTC, with public trackers showing holdings around the 780k–790k mark in recent filings. But an important nuance is that a lot of IBIT’s buying happens off-market via OTC desks. That means those purchases don’t always show up as aggressive market bids that lift prices in real time. In effect, IBIT has been a backstop; without its off-market buying, the latest correction could easily have been much deeper.
The historical echo is worth noting: MicroStrategy ’s stock peaked around November 2024 and then failed to set higher highs for almost a year, a pattern that mirrors what we’re seeing at the ETF level: peak demand, then a long, grinding cooling. For traders and allocators, this matters: short-term inflows might pop back on headlines or momentum, but the trend remains negative unless the big ETF buyers return to steady, visible market purchases.
If they don’t, OTC sellers will eventually push inventory into the open market and the next leg down could be more violent than it looks today. For now, investors should treat any rally as tentative. Price may flirt with new near-term highs, but without robust, on-exchange ETF absorption, the rally will be fragile, and fragile rallies have a habit of collapsing fast.
