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BlackRock asked the SEC on Oct. 19 to launch the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF, ticker PBIT, a third bitcoin vehicle that trades capped upside for partial downside floors using options on IBIT.
Wall Street signage outside the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Carlos Delgado via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source
BlackRock filed on Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a third U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded fund, this one built to hold most of a bad year while giving away part of a good one. The filing, a Form 485APOS under Securities Act file number 333-92935, lists the fund as the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF with the proposed ticker PBIT, according to the SEC filing and contemporaneous coverage from Unchained.
The fund would keep the bulk of its assets in the iShares Bitcoin Trust, the $65.7 billion IBIT product that already dominates U.S. bitcoin ETF flows. The protective overlay comes from three overlapping tranches of call options on IBIT. Each tranche carries a protection start value of roughly 90% of the tranche's net asset value at the start of its period. If IBIT falls below that line, the tranche absorbs the decline only to a designed floor near 10% before fees. Deeper losses pass through to shareholders, and the filing gives the adviser broad discretion to change how many tranches run, how long they last and what protection levels apply, Cointelegraph reported.
The upside is the price of that cushion. Each tranche sells call options, so gains above the strike are capped for the length of the option cycle. The filing's fee table is still blank, carrying a placeholder rate of 0.00%, and the fund would take effect 75 days after the filing, which points to a launch window in early January 2027 assuming the SEC does not extend its review, Crypto Briefing noted.
BlackRock already runs the largest spot bitcoin ETF and, through a partnership structure, one of the largest spot ether ETFs, with the iShares Ethereum Trust holding roughly $8 billion. PBIT targets a different buyer: the allocator who wants bitcoin exposure without the full drawdown profile. Fund analysts have spent 2026 pointing at the growing shelf of defined-outcome and buffer products in equities and asking when the crypto complex would get the same treatment. This filing answers that question with the first major U.S. example.
The mechanics follow the equity template. A buffer fund does not eliminate losses. It sets a reference line, usually near the purchase value, and promises to absorb declines down to a floor once the fund's protective structure is in place. Everything under the floor still hits the shareholder, and the premium for that cushion is the call options the fund sells away. In PBIT's case each tranche runs its own cycle, so protection levels reset as old options expire and new ones are sold. An investor who buys after a tranche has already fallen below its protection start value enters without the cushion that earlier buyers hold.
The filing lists Erin Armstrong, Kyle McClements and Richard Mejzak as portfolio managers, the same team behind BlackRock's options-based ETF lineup, Unchained reported. The structure echoes products already common in stock and bond ETFs, where managers sell covered calls or buy protective puts to reshape a return path rather than predict a price.
Cointelegraph's headline put the omission plainly: still no Solana or XRP. BlackRock's U.S. crypto ETF shelf remains two bitcoin vehicles and one ether vehicle once PBIT is added. Altcoin filings elsewhere in the market continue to wait on separate SEC decisions, and nothing in Monday's submission changes that queue.
The SEC's review clock starts from the filing date. The fund would trade on an exchange to be named later, and its prospectus language on caps, floors and effective dates can still change before the registration is effective. Until then, PBIT sits in the same queue as every other new crypto ETP filing: submitted, public, and not yet tradeable.