BlackRock is close to launching a bitcoin fund that pays an income.
The world’s largest asset manager filed its fourth amendment to the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF on Tuesday, according to its SEC filing. The fund will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker BITA.
The income comes from options. The fund owns bitcoin and shares in IBIT, BlackRock’s $47 billion spot bitcoin ETF. Every month it sells call options on these IBIT shares.
A call option gives the buyer the right to buy the shares at a set price. The fund charges a fee, called a premium, to sell this right. This premium is the income it provides to investors.
As such, selling calls limits how much the fund gains if bitcoin rallies hard. Investors take fixed income in exchange for giving up part of a large haul. The fund plans to write calls at 25% to 35% of its value at a time.
The fee is the edge though. BlackRock set the sponsor fee at 0.65%, which is below the two largest covered-call bitcoin funds, YBTC and BTCI, which charge 0.95% and 0.99%, Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas said in a note on X.
BlackRock just filed a new (and likely final) change for their Bitcoin Premium Income ETF $BITA and WE HAVE A FEE: 65bps. Obv higher than $IBIT et al, but lower than the two biggest ETFs in the ‘covered call’ category which are 95bp and 99bp. My guess is that this will launch… pic.twitter.com/KBwFrmkdbJ
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) June 10, 2026
Balchunas added that he expects the fund to launch very soon, noting that BlackRock is under pressure to beat Goldman Sachs to the market, with Goldman’s own bitcoin fund expected to go live around July 1.
BlackRock already has the strongest distribution base in the spot bitcoin ETF market. Its iShares Bitcoin Trust, IBIT, has become the sector’s flagship product, regularly drawing the biggest inflows and often absorbing capital even as rival funds see redemptions.
IBIT and Fidelity’s FBTC have increasingly turned the US spot bitcoin ETF market into a two-company race, with smaller issuers often contributing little to daily flows.
The launch would be another step in making bitcoin an income product for ordinary investors. The filing shows that the fund has already been seeded and has started buying bitcoin and IBIT shares – a sign that it is close to being ready.
