ETFs
Wisconsin Pension Buys $160M Bitcoin ETF
The Wisconsin State Investment Board is one of the first U.S. public pension funds to allocate a cash Bitcoin ETF, recent SEC filings show.
According to SWIB Form 13F for the first quarter of 2024the $156 billion pension fund purchased BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, 1,013,000 shares and 2,450,400 shares respectively.
Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust closed at $63.17 at the end of the first quarter. iShares Bitcoin Trust closed the quarter at $40.47.
A SWIB spokesperson confirmed that the fund held positions in both ETFs as of March 31, 2024. SWIB’s Form 13F was published on Tuesday.
Not the first?
Speaking at an event earlier this month in London, Manuel Nordeste, head of digital assets business development at Fidelity Investments, noted that defined benefit plans and other pension funds are “only starting to talk to their committees investment » crypto assets.
“Now we’re starting to have conversations with the big real money institutional investor types, and we’re getting some of those clients, as well as corporates and so on,” Nordeste said.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Robert Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, said institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and endowments, are currently discussing how to approach crypto ETFs.
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Keywords: Bitcoin, Bitcoin ETFs, Manuel Nordeste, Robert Mitchnick, Wisconsin State Investment Council, SWIB