Bitcoin prices can be volatile, but they have not stopped huge financial institutions from continuing to invest more.
Large institutions such as pensions and hedge funds tripled their holdings of spot bitcoin exchange funds (ETFs) in the fourth quarter of 2024.
According to Matt Hougan, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer, institutional investors have purchased $38.7 billion worth of Bitcoin ETFs. That was more than three times the previous quarter, where holdings worth $12.4 billion were reported.
Investors with assets exceeding $100 million require the SEC to report their holdings quarterly.
Among other things, several hedge funds and pension funds have begun purchasing funds since January 2024, when Bitcoin ETFs were first launched. Since then, some of them have increased their holdings over the past year, like the Wisconsin Investment Board.
Similarly, billionaire hedge fund investor Paul Tudor has nearly doubled IBIT’s shares to 8,048,552 shares from 4,428,230. Meanwhile, Corvex Management, an asset management company founded in December 2010 by investor Keith Meister, announced at the end of the fourth quarter that it owns more than 1 million shares in IBIT.
IBIT currently has 1,100 institutional owners who reported their stock via 13F filing, according to Eric Bulknath, a senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. He said most newly launched ETFs usually have fewer than 10 holders.
“There’s no way to track it, but my guess is that the record for the first year so far was (probably) 350 (the new ETF facility holder),” Balchunas writes.