Registered investment advisors and other professional investment firms have purchased $3.5 billion in spot bitcoin ETFs, according to an analysis from Bitwise.
All told, 563 professional investment firms reported owning $3.5 billion worth of bitcoin ETFs as of last Thursday, according to Bitwise’s analysis of Form 13F filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agency requires firms with $100 million or more to report their holdings of publicly traded securities quarterly.
“By the time the May 15 filing deadline arrives, I suspect we may end up with 700-plus professional firms and total AUM approaching $5 billion,” said Matt Hougan, Bitwise’s chief investment officer.
Hightower Advisors, the second largest RIA firm in the U.S., according to Barron’s, with $122 billion in AUM, reported owning $68 million of bitcoin ETFs.
Cambridge Investment Research (with $170 billion in AUM) owns $40 million in bitcoin ETFs; Brown Advisory (with $96 billion in AUM) owns $4 million in bitcoin ETFs; Sequoia Financial Advisors (with $17 billion in AUM) owns $12 million in bitcoin ETFs; and Integrated Advisors (with $4 billion in AUM) owns $11 million in bitcoin ETFs, according to their SEC filings.
Bracebridge Capital, a Boston-based hedge fund that manages money for institutional clients such as Yale and Princeton, holds a whopping $434 million in bitcoin ETFs, Bitwise said.
Hougan predicts that RIA purchases are in their infancy if past RIA buying patterns are any indication.
Ric Edelman, the founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, added, “This is just the start, and their firms are racing to complete their due diligence process, which will culminate in getting these ETFs on their platforms and in their portfolio models.”
“Within two years, these investments will be routinely available by virtually every firm,” said Edelman, who predicted in a webinar sponsored by his organization that bitcoin’s price will reach $420,000 by 2030.
The coin, which has seen a roughly 50% increase in value so far this year, was trading at more than $67,000 Friday morning.
“While I’d consider $3 billion to $5 billion and 563 to 700 firms a huge success, it’s important to remember that bitcoin ETFs have $50 billion in assets under management,” said Hougan. “As a percentage of total investment, therefore, professional investors own just 7% to 10% of all assets.”
Many investment firms and professionals take a similar approach when offering crypto and similar assets—performing six to 12 months of due diligence, making small personal allocations to test the market before investors are exposed, making isolated allocations for clients, and then offering platform-wide allocations after six months ranging from 1% to 5% of client portfolios. Given those approaches, Hougan expects RIA and professional investment allocations to grow exponentially.
“Not all advisors fit this mold, but we’ve seen it again and again,” noted Hougan, who called the year-to-date RIA bitcoin ETF purchases “just a down payment.”
“Hightower Advisors may have $68 million allocated to bitcoin ETFs today, for instance, which is great, but it’s just 0.05% of their assets. If they follow the pattern outlined above, that allocation will build over time. And to put it in context, a 1% allocation of their portfolio to bitcoin would equate to $1.2 billion—all from a single firm,” he added.
More than 35% of financial advisors said they planned to recommend digital assets to their clients within the next six months, up from just 21% of advisors in December, according to a new survey from the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals sponsored by Franklin Templeton.