What Arkham actually tagged
The blockchain analytics firm announced the labels on November 9, 2026. VanEck’s VBTC Bitcoin ETN was one piece of a larger batch covering addresses linked to approximately $3 billion in institutional fund holdings.
Arkham ’s research puts VBTC’s holdings at between 6,864.99 and 6,868 BTC. The small spread reflects slightly different snapshots of the same wallets, not a mystery stash hiding in the couch cushions.
The coins are split across 40 distinct addresses. Spreading holdings like that is standard practice for custody, much like a bank doesn’t keep every gold bar in a single vault.
The labeling traces back to Arkham’s top-100 holders report, dated November 3-4, 2026. That report fed a broader initiative to map wallets belonging to regulated digital asset products.
VanEck was not alone in the spotlight. The same batch included several other European and US investment products:
CoinShares BITC, at $1.52 billion
Invesco BTIC, at $266.6 million
Grayscale Solana Trust, at $125.9 million
CoinShares’ figure dwarfs VanEck’s tally, making it the heavyweight among the products named. Grayscale’s entry stands out for a different reason: it is the only one in that list built around Solana rather than Bitcoin.
VBTC’s labels, by contrast, cover Bitcoin and nothing else. No other crypto assets appear in the VanEck addresses Arkham identified.
A six-year-old product gets an on-chain profile
VBTC is not new. VanEck launched it in Europe on November 19, 2020, as a physically backed exchange-traded note.
Physically backed means the product holds actual Bitcoin, kept in cold storage, rather than tracking the price through derivatives. Think of it as the difference between owning gold bars and owning a bet on gold.
The ETN tracks the MarketVector Bitcoin VWAP Close Index and trades on European exchanges. For investors there, it has offered a regulated wrapper for direct Bitcoin exposure without the hassle of managing private keys.
VanEck also runs a US spot Bitcoin ETF under the HODL ticker. Arkham’s new labels sit alongside the existing tracking of that fund, giving observers a view of both the European and American sides of VanEck’s Bitcoin business.
The labels do not change anything about how VBTC works. The structure, the custody arrangement and the underlying holdings all stay the same. What changes is who can see the wallets move.
Why wallet labels matter
Blockchains are public, but public is not the same as legible. Anyone could already see these 40 addresses and their balances. What they couldn’t easily see was who owned them.
Arkham’s labels close that gap. Once a wallet carries a name, its inflows and outflows stop being anonymous noise and start telling a story about a specific fund.
For an ETN, those movements matter. When investors buy into the product, the issuer typically needs more Bitcoin to back the new notes. When investors cash out, coins can leave. Those creation and redemption flows now show up on-chain under VanEck’s name.
Arkham has said it plans to extend this coverage to more traditional finance participants as they move deeper into digital asset markets. VBTC is one data point in what is shaping up to be a much bigger map.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy .
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