Goldman Sachs jumps into bitcoin ETFs and one hedge fund gets bullish on miners
When the SEC opened the door in January for bitcoin exchange-traded funds to hit the mainstream, many traditional financial institutions across Wall Street and beyond finally had the opportunity to buy into crypto. Since then, money has poured in, but in fits and starts.
On Wednesday, banks and hedge funds with more than $100 million in assets hit a deadline to file their second-quarter 13F reports, disclosing their investments and what they bought and sold over a three-month stretch.
Goldman Sachs went big in the quarter, while rival Morgan Stanley trimmed its crypto holdings. JPMorgan has yet to make a big splash.
There are no shortage of opportunities for firms that want to take their time getting into the market. Following an array of public ETF listings in January tied to bitcoin, the Securities and Exchange Commission went a step further last month, clearing the way for spot ether ETFs, allowing investors to get access to the second-largest cryptocurrency. Those new holdings will start showing up in third-quarter reports.
In the period from March through June, Goldman Sachs made its debut in the crypto ETF market, purchasing $418 million worth of bitcoin funds. Its biggest position is a $238 million ownership in shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust. The bank also owns shares in spot funds from Grayscale, Invesco, Fidelity and others.
Morgan Stanley was the first among the big players on Wall Street to give the green light to its 15,000 financial advisors to start pitching clients, who have a net worth north of $1.5 million, bitcoin ETFs, specifically those issued by BlackRock and Fidelity. Up to this point, wealth management businesses have only facilitated trades if customers requested exposure to the new spot crypto funds.
Of Morgan Stanley’s $1.5 trillion in assets under management, the bank disclosed in its filing that it trimmed its position in spot bitcoin ETFs to around $189 million from roughly $270 million. Most of those cuts were due to sales of almost all of its shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which has a much higher management fee than other ETFs. The vast majority of the bank’s spot bitcoin holdings are now through the iShares trust.
JP Morgan reported minimal crypto exposure of around $42,000 worth of shares in Grayscale’s bitcoin fund and another $18,000 worth of the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF. HSBC has nearly $3.6 million worth of spot bitcoin holdings, all from the fund issued by Ark 21Shares, UBS has around $300,000 worth of spot bitcoin ETF holdings, and Bank of America has collective holdings of around $5.3 million, mostly from BlackRock and Fidelity.
For most of the banks, the vast majority, if not all, of the ETF flows can be attributed to wealth management clients asking for exposure, rather than a decision by the firm to hold the assets on its balance sheet.
While Wall Street investment banks are coming in slowly, hedge funds are taking a more aggressive approach.
Millennium Management, which oversees $62 billion, now holds over $1.1 billion worth of shares in at least five Bitcoin ETFs, and is the single largest holder of shares in BlackRock’s bitcoin fund, with shares worth more than $371 million according to its August filing.
That’s down substantially from the $844 million worth of shares it held as of its May filing, having cut its stake in BlackRock’s fund by about half, and in Grayscale’s by more than half.
London-based Capula Investment Management, one of the top hedge funds in Europe with $30 billion under management, disclosed in a recent SEC filing that it holds more than $464 million in spot bitcoin ETFs, including the funds offered by BlackRock and Fidelity.
Point72 Asset Management and Apollo Management have also jumped into the market as have firms including Citadel Advisors, Jane Street and Fortress Investment Group.
Since launching in January, spot bitcoin funds have seen net flows of around $17.5 billion, bringing total assets in the funds to $53.5 billion as of mid-August. Grayscale’s fund, which existed previously and was converted to an ETF, has seen $19.4 billion in outflows since the change, though its new budget product has seen net inflows of $274 million.
Spot ether ETFs hold more than $7.6 billion as of Tuesday. Barclays analysts noted that trading volume across all spot crypto ETF products has declined, compared to spot exchange volumes.
Still, the new ETF activity has helped lift bitcoin prices, which hit a record above $73,000 in March. The price has since dropped sharply, to under $58,000, alongside volatility in the boarder markets, though it’s still up more than 30% this year.
“The crypto markets are strong because we have the sentiment shift,” Galaxy Digital chief Mike Novogratz told CNBC in May. “Crypto is now an asset class. It will be next year, it will be forever. And it wasn’t that way two years ago. There was risk around the asset class, and it’s been de risked.”
Bitcoin mining lures new investors
ETFs aren’t the only way investors are playing the market.
Daniel Sundheim’s D1 Capital built up a bitcoin mining position in the latest quarter, taking advantage of a shift as miners retrofit their facilities to service artificial intelligence clients. Like crypto mining, artificial intelligence workloads require immense amounts of power.
D1, which managed about $19 billion at the beginning of the year, bought nearly $5.4 million worth of Bitdeer Technologies, $17.3 million of Iris Energy, and nearly $17.4 million in shares of Hut 8 Corp.
Hut 8 said in its first-quarter earnings report that it had purchased Nvidia’s AI processors and secured a customer agreement with a venture-backed AI cloud platform as part of its expansion. Iris Energy expects to generate up to $17 million in annual revenue from its AI cloud services.
The combined market capitalization of the 14 major U.S.-listed bitcoin miners hit a record high of $22.8 billion on June 15, according to a note from JPMorgan, which has also been investing capital into an ETF of miners and individual companies. UBS has added shares of Bitdeer, Bitfarms, Bit Digital, Hut 8, as well as more than $5 million in Iris Energy, as of its latest 13F filing.
Sundheim, who previously built up a reputation as a savvy investor during his 15-year tenure at Viking Global Investors, has changed his tune on bitcoin. In 2019, he equated Canadian pot companies to the closest thing to a bubble since bitcoin.
LAS VEGAS — The bitcoin treasury play that lifted Strategy’s market cap past $80 billion is now being mimicked by meme stock companies, media firms, and multinational conglomerates. But Wall Street isn’t buying all the hype.
This week, Trump Media announced plans to raise $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin, and GameStop revealed a $500 million allocation. Meanwhile, Tether, SoftBank, and Strike’s Jack Mallers unveiled Twenty One, a bitcoin-native public company expected to launch with more than 42,000 bitcoin on its balance sheet, enough to make it the third-largest corporate holder of the asset globally.
For now, the market doesn’t see the next Strategy in any of them. Trump Media shares have dropped more than 20% since the announcement, while GameStop is down nearly 17%. Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, has multiplied by 26 times since the end of 2022, amassing a bitcoin stake worth over $60 billion.
“Maybe the market wanted them to buy more bitcoin,” said Strategy Chairman Michael Saylor in an interview at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas. “But these are short-term dynamics. Over the long term, bitcoin on the balance sheet has proven to be extraordinarily popular.”
Saylor called Trump Media’s move “courageous, aggressive, and intelligent” — and said the flood of similar announcements marks a global shift in corporate finance.
“Everywhere I go at this conference, someone says, you know, I’m working on a bitcoin treasury company in Hong Kong. I’m doing this thing in Korea. I’ve got this thing I’m working on in Abu Dhabi. We’re going to do this in the Middle East, you know, we’ve got this in the U.K.,“ he said. “There’s an explosion of interest right now.”
Saylor said bitcoin ambassadors are “planting the orange flag everywhere on earth.”
What began as a fringe financial maneuver is quickly becoming a geopolitical race. Under the Biden administration, corporate bitcoin adoption was often treated as a regulatory red flag. But under President Donald Trump, the tone has changed.
In March, Trump signed an executive order establishing a U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, instructing federal agencies to treat bitcoin as a long-term store of value. The reserve will be funded entirely through bitcoin seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases, according to White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks. The order also empowers the government to explore additional budget-neutral mechanisms for acquiring more bitcoin.
For the first time, the federal government will conduct a full audit of its digital asset holdings, currently estimated at more than 200,000 bitcoin. The order explicitly prohibits the sale of any bitcoin from the reserve, cementing its role as a permanent sovereign asset.
‘No force on Earth’
Vice President JD Vance this week became the first sitting vice president to address the bitcoin community directly, framing crypto as a hedge against inflation, censorship, and “unelected bureaucrats.” And in a further move to boost bitcoin, the Department of Labor rolled back guidance that had discouraged bitcoin investments in retirement plans.
“No force on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come,” Saylor said. “Bitcoin is digital capital and maybe the most explosive idea of the era.“
Some corners of the corporate world are still resistant. Late last year, Microsoft shareholders rejected a proposal to use some of the software company’s massive cash pile to follow Saylor’s lead. In a video presentation supporting the effort, Saylor told investors that “Microsoft can’t afford to miss the next technology wave.”
While Strategy has reaped the rewards of early adoption, Saylor suggested the market’s cooler reaction to Trump Media and GameStop may stem more from structural financing dynamics than from skepticism toward bitcoin itself.
He pointed to GameStop’s initial announcement that it was considering a bitcoin strategy, which led to a 50% pop in the stock and tenfold increase in trading volume. The company quickly capitalized on the momentum with a $1.5 billion convertible bond raise — a move he described as “extraordinarily successful.” Trump Media took a similar approach, raising capital through a large convertible bond offering.
Saylor said those financing methods can create short-term downward pressure, but that over time investors will benefit.
When it comes to Strategy, Saylor said there’s no ceiling to his bitcoin accumulation plans. His company is already by far the largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency.
“We’ll keep buying bitcoin,” he told CNBC. “We expect the price of bitcoin will keep going up. We think it will get exponentially harder to buy bitcoin, but we will work exponentially more efficiently to buy bitcoin.”
For critics who worry that state and media actors embracing bitcoin will undermine its decentralized ideals, Saylor argues the opposite.
“The network is very anti-fragile, and there’s a balance of power here,” he said. “The more actors that come into the ecosystem, the more diverse, the more distributed the protocol is, the more incorruptible it becomes, the more robust it becomes, and so that means the more trustworthy it becomes to larger economic actors who otherwise would be afraid to put all of their economic weight on the network.”
WATCH: Bitcoin heads for winning month despite return of trade war fears: CNBC Crypto World
More than $14 billion in US renewable and EV investments and 10,000 new jobs have been scrapped or put on hold since January, according to a new analysis from E2 and the Clean Economy Tracker. The reason: growing fears that the Republican-majority Congress will pull the plug on federal clean energy tax credits.
In April alone, companies backed out of $4.5 billion in battery, EV, and wind projects right before the House passed a sweeping tax and spending bill that would gut the federal tax incentives fueling the clean energy boom. E2 also found another $1.5 billion in previously unreported project cancellations from earlier in the year.
Now, with the Senate preparing to take up the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” E2 says over 10,000 clean energy jobs have already vanished.
“If the tax plan passed by the House last week becomes law, expect to see construction and investments stopping in states across the country as more projects and jobs are cancelled,” said Michael Timberlake, E2’s communications director. “Businesses are now counting on Congress to come to its senses and stop this costly attack on an industry that is essential to meeting America’s growing energy demand and that’s driving unprecedented economic growth in every part of the country.”
Ironically, it’s Republican-led congressional districts – the biggest beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s clean energy tax credits passed in 2022 – that are feeling the most pain. So far, more than $12 billion in investments and over 13,000 jobs have been canceled in GOP districts.
Through April, 61% of all clean energy projects, 72% of jobs, and 82% of investments have been in Republican districts.
Despite the rising number of cancellations, some companies are still forging ahead. In April, businesses announced nearly $500 million in new clean energy investments across six states. That includes a $400 million expansion by Corning in Michigan to make solar wafers, which is expected to create at least 400 jobs, and a $9.3 million investment from a Canadian solar equipment company in North Carolina.
If completed, the seven projects announced last month could create nearly 3,000 permanent jobs.
To date, E2 has tracked 390 major clean energy projects across 42 states and Puerto Rico since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August 2022. In total, companies plan to invest $132 billion and hire 123,000 permanent workers.
But the report warns that momentum could grind to a halt if the House tax plan becomes law. Since the clean energy tax credits were signed into law, 45 announced projects have been canceled, downsized, or closed entirely, wiping out nearly 20,000 jobs and $16.7 billion in investments.
What’s more, Trump’s Department of Energy announced today that it was killing more than $3.7 billion in funding for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and decarbonization initiatives. Eighteen out of 24 projects were awarded through DOE’s Industrial Demonstrations Program (IDP), which was made law in the Inflation Reduction Act. It aimed to strengthen the economic competitiveness of US manufacturers in global markets demanding lower carbon emissions, while supporting US manufacturing jobs and communities.
Executive Director Jason Walsh of the BlueGreen Alliance said in a statement in response to today’s DOE announcement:
The awarded projects that DOE is seeking to kill are concentrated in rural areas and red states. American manufacturers are hungry to partner with the federal government to bolster US industry. The IDP saw $60 billion worth of applications during the program selection process, a ten-times oversubscription.
President Trump claims to be a champion of American manufacturing, but today’s announcement is further evidence that he and his Secretary of Energy are liars.
Read more: Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump
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A Tesla prototype was spotted at the Fremont factory in California, sparking speculation that it’s the new “cheaper Tesla”, but it looks like a regular Model Y.
A drone operator flew over the Fremont factory this week and spotted a Tesla prototype with light camouflage on the front and back ends.
The vehicle is making a lot of people talk on social media and the media as many think it could be a new “affordable model” coming to Tesla.
Other than the camouflage, the vehicle looks just like a regular Model Y:
It’s likely one of two things: a new “stripped-down Model Y” or a Model Y Performance.
Model Y Performance is the only version that Tesla hasn’t launched since the design changeover earlier this year.
The “stripped-down Model Y” is what will replace Tesla’s upcoming “affordable models.”
We have been reporting on this new vehicle program from Tesla for a while now.
It came to life just over a year ago as a pivot for Tesla after CEO Elon Musk canceled two cheaper vehicles that Tesla was working on, commonly referred as “the $25,000 Tesla”. Those vehicles were codenamed NV91 and NV92, and they were based on the new vehicle platform that Tesla is now reserving for the Cybercab.
Instead, Musk saw that Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y production lines were starting to be underutilized as Tesla faced demand issues. Therefore, Tesla canceled the vehicles program based on the new platform and decided to build new vehicles on Model 3/Y platform using the same production lines.
We previously reported that these electric vehicles will likely look very similar to Model 3 and Model Y.
In recent months, several other media reports reinforced that, and Tesla all but confirmed it during its latest earnings call.
Considering this looks like a regular Model Y, it could be the new cheaper and less feature rich Model Y:
Some people are claiming that this vehicle looks smaller than the Model Y, but it’s difficult to tell as the black camouflage on the ends can confuse the eye.
It looks like a very similar size when it passes near other Tesla vehicles:
What do you think it is? Let us know in the comment section below.
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