Goldman Sachs Joins Morgan Stanley in Holding Bitcoin ETFs as Institutional Interest Grows: 13F Wrap

• Investment advisors were the largest holders of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds as they held a total of $4.7 billion on behalf of clients.
• Goldman Sachs held $418 million worth of bitcoin while Morgan Stanley purchased $188 million.

Investment advisors including Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were among the biggest holders of spot bitcoin (BTC) ETFs at the end of second quarter, as clients amped up their crypto allocations to a total of $4.7 billion.

Goldman Sachs held $418 million worth of bitcoin on behalf of its clients in the months as of June 30, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The modest customer allocation comes after the chief investment officer of the bank’s wealth management unit told the Wall Street Journal in April that the bank's clients weren't showing a lot of interest in the asset class.

Morgan Stanley – which reportedly just gave the green light for its brokers to offer the bitcoin ETFs to clients – held $188 million worth of the spot funds on June 30, an $87 million decline from three months earlier.

Both Wall Street powerhouses favored BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), now the largest of the spot ETFs, but they also purchased shares of Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin ETF (FBTC) and the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO) as well as some of the other offerings.

“It’s clear that institutional adoption of spot bitcoin ETFs continues to accelerate,” said Nate Geraci, president of the ETF Store. “Generally speaking, institutional investors tend to have extremely rigorous due diligence processes which can lengthen the adoption period for any type of investment. The speed at which institutional investors are wading into spot bitcoin ETFs is astounding.”

A small number of well-known hedge funds continued with stakes in the bitcoin ETFs, among them Izzy Englander's Millennium Management. Notably, however, Paul Singer's Elliott Management – which disclosed a $12 million stake in BlackRock's IBIT at the end of the first quarter – had totally exited that position by this latest June 30 reporting date.

Another holder of interest at the end of the first quarter was the Wisconsin Pension Fund, which in the last quarter doubled down on its IBIT position as it purchased an additional 447,651 shares of the fund. It also got rid of all of its shares of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) which were worth $63.7 million at the end of March. The state now owns 2,898,051 shares or $98.9 million as of the end of June.