What 13F filings tell us about institutional appetite for bitcoin ETFs

13F filings continue to pour in and are a good gauge of institutional interest in bitcoin ETFs.

The forms were first filed at the beginning of last month and will continue to come in until mid-May.

The document is a required form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission which discloses the quarterly holdings for institutions that manage $100 million or more.

Two of the biggest institutions to disclose holdings in a bitcoin ETF so far have been BNP Paribas and BNY Mellon.

BNY Mellon’s 13F shows that it owns nearly 20,000 shares of IBIT and roughly 7,000 shares of Grayscale’s bitcoin ETF GBTC.

BNP Paribas, on the other hand, only owns about 1,000 shares of IBIT.

The holdings, clearly, are small potatoes. But there are some smaller firms with much bigger bags.

Take a look at Pittsburgh-based registered investment manager Quattro Advisors, for example.

The 13F showed that they own 468,200 shares of BlackRock’s ETF. There’s also Legacy Wealth Management, which disclosed that it owns over 350,000 shares of Fidelity’s ETF.

But one of the largest IBIT holders is Yong Rong, which disclosed in its 13F that it holds over a million shares of BlackRock’s fund. According to the filing, this makes BlackRock one of the biggest holdings in the manager’s portfolio.

Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas pointed out that Yong Rong isn’t the only Hong Kong asset manager to leap into the bitcoin ETFs. Ovata, Balchunas posted on X, holds multiple bitcoin ETFs including Fidelity, Grayscale and Bitwise alongside IBIT.

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These companies join a list of firms who’ve previously disclosed their holdings, including Brookstone Capital Management —- which owns both Fidelity and Bitwise’s ETFs — and LexAurum, another IBIT holder.

As Blockworks previously reported, some analysts have said that this is just the starting line and not to expect too much from this first quarter of 13Fs. But, as we continue to monitor the filings, the appetite may pick up. Some of the bigger institutions tend to wait to file until closer to the deadline.

A version of this article was included in today’s Empire newsletter.

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