One of the world’s largest investment banks continues to buy up crypto, according to a Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Goldman Sachs reported that, as of the end of 2024, it held about $2.05 billion in ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum, the world’s two largest cryptocurrencies.
The financial firm held about $1.3 billion of BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF shares and $300 million of Fidelity’s. Exchange-traded funds let investors gain exposure to an asset without needing to buy the asset themselves.
Goldman Sachs also held almost $500 million in Ethereum ETFs, split equally between BlackRock and Fidelity. The company’s crypto ETF holdings jumped 50% from the prior quarter, when its holdings were worth about $720 million, according to SEC filings.
It’s unclear whether the investment bank’s crypto holdings are its own investments or assets it holds on behalf of clients. A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I’d be surprised if this was Goldman itself expressing a view, but it’s encouraging to see Goldman’s clients joining the broader digital asset movement,” Chris Kline, COO and cofounder of BitcoinIRA, a crypto investment platform, told Fortune.
ETF explosion
Goldman Sachs’ growing crypto portfolio comes as institutional investors show an increased appetite for digital assets following a boom in crypto ETFs.
In January 2024, the U.S. saw the launch of its first spot Bitcoin ETFs, or financial vehicles that give investors exposure to real-time price movements in the world’s largest cryptocurrency. Large Wall Street firms soon plunged into the burgeoning asset class.
Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund, all bought up portions of the newly launched financial products, according to SEC filings.
Even Wisconsin’s pension fund joined in and bought almost $100 million shares in spot Bitcoin ETFs in the beginning of 2024.
In total, investors have thrown more than $40 billion into spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. and $3.2 billion into spot Ether ETFs, according to SoSoValue, a crypto data platform.
Sidney Powell, the CEO and cofounder of Maple, which lets users lend and borrow crypto, told Fortune that Goldman Sachs’ most recent disclosure of its Bitcoin holdings indicates that deep-pocketed investors are becoming more savvy in their crypto investments.
In addition to its ownership shares in spot Bitcoin ETFs, the investment bank also disclosed that it owned almost $700 million in spot Bitcoin ETF options.
Goldman Sachs has bet more than $500 million that Bitcoin’s price will increase and hedged with an almost $160 million bet that its price will fall.
“They wouldn’t be readily available without the ETF,” Powell said of the Bitcoin options bets. “It signals growing maturity in the Bitcoin and crypto space.”
Update, February 12, 2025: This article has been updated with a comment from Chris Kline, COO and cofounder of BitcoinIRA, as well as a sentence that Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
