Key Insights:
- Bitwise’s total Bitcoin dev donations hit $383K, including $233K announced on Wednesday’s Bitcoin news.
- The money comes from 10% of BITB profits, on top of $150K donated in Feb 2025.
- Brink, OpenSats, and HRF will decide how to distribute the funds.
- BITB inflows have reached about $2.2B since launch, with a slight increase in early 2026.
Bitwise has renewed its push to fund the people who quietly keep Bitcoin running, as per the latest Bitcoin news. The crypto asset manager said on Wednesday that it had set aside another $233,000 to support Bitcoin developers.
According to the company, the funding came from 10% of the profits made from the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB).
Bitcoin News: Bitwise Continues Donating Funds to Open-source Bitcoin Developers
As per recent Bitcoin news, this new contribution follows an earlier $150,000 donation in February 2025, after BITB completed its first full year on the market. Bitwise first launched the ETF in January 2024.
Around the launch, the firm promised to share part of the ETF’s success with the Bitcoin community. Bitwise said the developers behind the scenes matter because they keep the network running and secure, even as Bitcoin has grown into a roughly $1.4 trillion market.
Instead of picking winners itself, Bitwise said it will let three Bitcoin-aligned nonprofits decide where the money goes.
The size of the donation also hints at how BITB performed. Since Bitwise based the payout on 10% of gross profits, the $233,000 figure implies roughly $2.33 million in gross profits from BITB in its second year. Bitwise generates revenue from the ETF by charging a 0.2% fee on the assets it manages.
BITB Still Ranks Third on Bitcoin ETF Flows
Even with fierce competition, BITB has stayed near the top of the Bitcoin ETF leaderboard. Data from Farside Investors shows BITB has attracted about $2.2 billion in net inflows since January 2024. That places it behind only BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, known as IBIT, and Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund, FBTC.
Still, the gap is enormous. IBIT sits far ahead with roughly $62.4 billion in inflows, while FBTC has pulled in about $11 billion. Bitwise remains a clear third, but it is competing in a category dominated by much larger brands.
What stands out is BITB’s resilience at the start of 2026. Many U.S. Bitcoin ETFs saw inflows cool as the broader crypto market pulled back. Even so, BITB’s net inflows edged up in the first nine weeks of the year.
Bitwise Says TradFi May Move Onchain Faster than Expected
Meanwhile, Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan signaled a major shift in his own timeline for on-chain finance. In a Tuesday Bitcoin news post titled ‘The weekend that changed finance’, Hougan said recent market behavior forced him to rethink how quickly traditional finance might adopt crypto’s always-on infrastructure.
He pointed to a key weekend in which traders flocked to crypto platforms to price and trade tokenized real-world assets during a period of intense geopolitical tension tied to a U.S.-Israel attack on Iran.
Hougan said the first strike hit around 3:30 a.m. UTC on Saturday, a moment when U.S., European, and Asian stock exchanges were closed. As a result, he said, traders treated on-chain venues as the most immediate place to express risk and find price signals.
Hougan highlighted Hyperliquid, a crypto perpetual futures platform, as a focal point. He said traders used it to trade instruments linked to assets such as crude oil and tokenized gold. Besides, he estimated the platform posted over $11.5 billion in trading volume across Saturday and Sunday.
Most importantly, Hougan said in recent Bitcoin news, how 24/7 blockchain rails can make legacy market structures look outdated. He previously expected traditional markets to take five to 10 years to move meaningfully on-chain.
Now, he said, that shift looks set to arrive much sooner. He also noted that when Bloomberg covered how crude oil reacted to the bombing, it referenced Hyperliquid’s crude oil contract as a key real-time price.