Bitcoin ETF Institutional Holders: The Adoption Map

TL;DR. For the quarter ended 31 March 2026, 2,023 managers disclosed shares in a US spot Bitcoin ETF, worth $19.585bn. The largest single position was Millennium Management's $1,008m — the only one above a billion. The median was $726,000. Nine names were above $500m and 36 above $100m; everyone else is small. Sovereign wealth is present (Mubadala $566m, Abu Dhabi Investment Council $316m) and pensions are all but absent (State of Michigan Retirement System, $6.7m, is the largest we found). The State of Wisconsin Investment Board, still named in most coverage, has reported nothing since 2024. Adoption is broad and shallow.

How this list was built, and what it can't be

Everything below comes from the SEC's Form 13F data set for the quarter ended 31 March 2026, original 13F-HR filings only, counting shares and excluding option positions. Why that last part matters — and why it changes several famous numbers by an order of magnitude — is in 13F filings explained.

One thing this article deliberately does not do: give a dollar total per holder type. Form 13F has no field for what kind of institution the filer is, and any "wealth managers hold $X, hedge funds $Y" breakdown you see has been assembled by hand from names and then rounded into confidence. The names below are real and each figure is the filer's own; the categories are our labels for reading convenience, not a census.

The ten largest disclosed positions

Two readings. It is not a list of believers — Marex and Galaxy are trading businesses, and BlackRock's own position is partly its funds holding its own ETF. And the drop-off is brutal: $1.0bn at the top, $452m at number ten, $726,000 at the median.

Banks and brokers: the biggest block, and mostly not their own money

Morgan Stanley ($757.5m), Goldman Sachs Group ($716.2m), Wells Fargo ($367.3m), JPMorgan Chase ($318.5m), Barclays ($172.9m) and Macquarie ($159.0m) all appear. It is tempting to read these as bank balance-sheet bets. They mostly are not. A bank's 13F covers everything it has investment discretion over, which for these firms is dominated by wealth-management and brokerage client accounts. Bank capital rules still treat unhedged crypto punitively, and none of these filings tells you which side of the house the position sits on.

Trading firms: present, large, and not directional

Jane Street ($418.3m of shares), Susquehanna ($368.0m), IMC-Chicago ($176.2m), Citadel Advisors ($52.8m) and Optiver ($10.2m) are in the data as market makers and authorised participants. Their share lines are inventory against option books many times larger — Citadel's $52.8m of shares sits beside $1,484m of option notional. Counting them as institutional adoption is a category error. What their role actually is: Authorized Participants explained.

Sovereign wealth: present, contrary to the usual story

Two Abu Dhabi entities file and both hold IBIT and nothing else: Mubadala Investment Company at $565.6m and Abu Dhabi Investment Council at $315.8m. Between them that is $881m, which would rank second on the list above. The common claim that no major sovereign wealth fund has disclosed a Bitcoin ETF position has been wrong for some time. Norges Bank, GIC, Temasek and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund appear nowhere in the Bitcoin ETF lines for this quarter.

Wealth managers: the breadth story

This is where the 2,023 filers actually live, and the individual tickets are small:

• LPL Financial — $220.4m spread across all ten funds it reports, led by IBIT $124.0m, GBTC $47.9m and EZBC $23.0m.
• HighTower Advisors — $123.3m over eight funds, led by IBIT $50.9m and GBTC $32.4m.
• Cetera Investment Advisers — $94.4m.
• Mariner, LLC — $92.1m.
• Creative Planning — $41.0m. Wealth Enhancement $25.4m, CAPTRUST $21.9m, Mercer Global Advisors $14.6m.

These are advisor-driven allocations: a model portfolio with a low single-digit crypto sleeve, multiplied across client accounts. It is the stickiest demand in the data, and why the filer count runs into the thousands while the median ticket stays tiny.

Pensions and endowments: smaller than the headlines

The largest public-pension position we found in the quarter was the State of Michigan Retirement System at $6.75m, held entirely in ARKB (300,000 shares). TIAA reported $55,193 of FBTC. That is close to the whole story for US public retirement money in this dataset.

Endowments are similarly modest but real: Emory University $40.6m in the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust, Brown University $8.2m of IBIT, and the Trustees of Dartmouth College $7.7m of IBIT. No Harvard, Yale or Princeton position appears.

Insurance is effectively absent. The only US-linked insurer in the data holds five figures.

The holder that isn't: State of Wisconsin

The State of Wisconsin Investment Board is still cited almost everywhere as a flagship pension allocator. Its own filings say otherwise. SWIB first disclosed in the March 2024 quarter ($99.2m of IBIT alongside $63.7m of GBTC), grew the IBIT position through the year and peaked at $321.5m, 6,060,351 shares, on 31 December 2024. From the March 2025 quarter onward its 13F contains no spot Bitcoin ETF at all — including the March 2026 quarter this article is built on. It sold, five quarters ago, and the story outlived the position.

Breadth without depth

Put the distribution next to the fund it mostly describes. IBIT's own Q1 2026 10-Q reports $53.385bn of net assets at 31 March 2026. 13F filers accounted for $12.594bn of that — under a quarter. Everything else is retail brokerage, IRAs, managers below the $100m filing threshold, and non-US institutions with no filing obligation.

Within the filer population, 877 held more than $1m, 201 more than $10m, 36 more than $100m, nine more than $500m, and one more than $1bn. Two thousand institutions own some; almost none own much. The next leg, if it comes, is existing holders sizing up rather than new names arriving — and no 13F warns you about that in advance. The series worth watching is the daily one: creations and redemptions, on the Bitcoin ETF flows page.

FAQ

Sources and further reading

• SEC, Form 13F data sets, quarter ended 31 March 2026; original 13F-HR filings, shares only, options excluded.
• SEC EDGAR, State of Wisconsin Investment Board Form 13F-HR filings for the quarters ended 31 March 2024 through 31 March 2026 (CIK 0000854157).
• SEC EDGAR, iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 31 March 2026 — net assets and shares outstanding.
• Internal: 13F filings explained, AUM growth analysis, Year-two performance.