BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust Brazilian depositary receipt, ticker IBIT39, began trading on B3 on March 1, 2024. The launch placed a locally traded security backed by BlackRock’s U.S. spot-bitcoin product inside Brazil’s conventional brokerage and exchange infrastructure only seven weeks after the American fund began trading.
The development mattered less as a new way for Brazilians to obtain any bitcoin exposure—Brazil already had locally listed crypto funds—than as an expansion of the institutional wrapper created around BlackRock’s U.S. trust. B3’s contemporaneous announcement described IBIT39 as the exchange’s first BDR of an exchange-traded fund linked to bitcoin. That narrower formulation is important: it was not Brazil’s first bitcoin fund and it did not give BDR holders bitcoin they could withdraw.
What began trading
A Brazilian depositary receipt is a security issued in Brazil and backed by an instrument listed abroad. In this case, IBIT39 represented exposure to shares of the U.S.-listed iShares Bitcoin Trust, known by the ticker IBIT. The underlying trust’s objective was to reflect generally the performance of bitcoin’s price, using the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate–New York Variant as its benchmark.
BlackRock’s product record gives March 1, 2024 as IBIT39’s start date. B3’s February 29 launch notice said the receipt would begin trading on March 1 with a 1:3 ratio to the U.S. instrument and identified a 0.25% annual management fee for the underlying product. Those are product terms, not a promise that the BDR would perfectly match bitcoin. Currency conversion, market hours, fees, receipt mechanics, trading spreads and the price of IBIT shares could all affect the Brazilian security.
The custody chain also remained institutional. IBIT held bitcoin through its designated custodian; the Brazilian receipt represented the foreign fund security. An IBIT39 investor therefore acquired an exchange-traded claim within a layered market structure, not possession of private keys or a redeemable bitcoin balance.
Brazil joined BlackRock’s rollout
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the exchange rule changes required for a group of spot-bitcoin exchange-traded products on January 10, 2024. IBIT began U.S. trading on January 11. B3’s launch report attributed approximately $8.5 billion of assets to the U.S. product by February 29, a sponsor-supplied figure that illustrated the speed of its initial growth but was not an audited measure of Brazilian demand.
Launching IBIT39 on March 1 extended that product across jurisdictions. It allowed eligible market participants to trade the receipt in Brazil through familiar securities-market plumbing while leaving the underlying bitcoin exposure, benchmark and custody arrangements in the U.S. trust. The significance was institutional distribution: a global asset manager and Brazil’s main exchange were connecting a spot-bitcoin vehicle to another national capital market.
That did not erase the differences between the two markets. Bitcoin traded continuously, while IBIT and IBIT39 observed exchange sessions in their respective jurisdictions. A sharp bitcoin move outside B3 hours could appear later in the receipt’s price, and the Brazilian real introduced a currency dimension absent from a simple BTC-USD chart.
The event-day market setting
Coinbase’s BTC-USD daily candle beginning at 00:00 UTC on March 1 opened at $61,179.03 and closed at $62,436.72. The 2.06% increase is Coinburn’s calculation from those two venue observations. Coinbase recorded an intraday low of $60,788.33, a high of $63,267.18 and volume of 24,696.65692545 BTC in that bucket.
Those figures describe one exchange, one dollar pair and one UTC window; they are not a consolidated global close. They establish that IBIT39 arrived during an elevated and volatile bitcoin market, not that the Brazilian launch caused the price move.
What March 1 established
The verifiable conclusion is limited but consequential. On March 1, BlackRock’s spot-bitcoin trust became accessible on B3 through the first Brazilian depositary receipt tied to a bitcoin ETF. The product broadened regulated distribution while preserving layers of fund, custody, currency and market-hours risk. Its debut demonstrated institutional reach; it did not establish adoption levels, future liquidity, price stability or direct ownership of bitcoin.
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