The supply chain attack on hardware wallet Ledger, which led to $100 million being stolen, is still causing a stir. Southeast Asian distributor CryptoBilis is in trouble and has now suspended all sales and shipments. Beyond concerns about Ledger's follow-up compensation, the community has begun discussing an old topic: how to better protect your assets.
Hardware wallets were previously the standard answer, because slogans like "control your private keys, and the assets are truly yours" have long been the creed of the cryptocurrency industry. But with hardware wallets experiencing problems one after another, user confidence has been greatly reduced, forcing people to think about what other methods can alleviate this anxiety.
The simplest is to put assets on trading platforms. Mainstream platforms theoretically all have the ability to compensate, but the FTX incident will certainly still be brought up.
Some people also use offline devices, such as an iPhone, restore it to factory settings, first install the apps, then turn on airplane mode, and then never connect to the internet again, while also turning off Bluetooth and NFC; signing relies on two phones scanning QR codes, which is also an old method used for years, just relatively troublesome.
Recently, someone proposed a new method that is quite interesting. It had not appeared in previous years because the product has only existed in the past two years: buying ETFs, such as BlackRock's IBIT.
Why IBIT can be regarded as a way to store Bitcoin
iShares' official holdings data on October 9 was: IBIT held 805,000 bitcoins, with a market value of about $66.7 billion, and the fund's net assets of about $66.3 billion.
Let's first look at the structure of IBIT.
This is a statutory trust. The custodian is Coinbase. Coinbase Custody Trust Company keeps all private keys for the trust's bitcoin in cold storage in the Vault Balance; the daily operations of the fund are handled by the trustee, the sponsor is responsible for overall oversight, and when redeeming or paying fees, instructs the custodian to move bitcoin from the Vault Balance to the trading balance. BlackRock does not hold the private keys.
In all processes, only Coinbase has the private keys. Choosing IBIT is, to a large extent, choosing to trust that Coinbase Custody will not have problems, that BlackRock will operate normally, that your broker will properly hold the shares, and that this trust and regulatory framework itself will hold up.
In other words, compared with trusting yourself, choosing IBIT means placing more trust in the judgment of institutions managing enormous amounts of money. After all, they have managed $15 trillion without any problems.
One more point: liquidity. ETF liquidity is noticeably much lower.
When you buy or sell IBIT in a brokerage account, it's matched and executed in the stock market—nothing happens on-chain. Bitcoin only actually moves when the fund's overall net holdings need to change. Subscriptions and redemptions go through Coinbase Prime via internal book-entry settlement, which doesn't count as an on-chain transfer. Bitcoin actually goes on-chain only at the step when the trust's trading balance is swept into the custodian's cold storage, executed in end-of-day batches.
Even when Bitcoin's market is doing well, the ETF's custody addresses show very few transactions. On June 2, 2025, 4,113 BTC—about $429.4 million—was transferred, split into multiple transactions of around 300 BTC each, totaling just over a dozen transactions, completed in two hours.
But trading platforms are definitely not at that frequency—tens of thousands of transactions a day is on the low end.
The lower the transaction frequency, the relatively greater the security. This is also where ETFs genuinely have an advantage.
So, who do you choose to trust?
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
