Bitcoin Forum

I am creating this topic to track all institutional investments in Bitcoin up to this point and beyond, there were a massive investments in 2020, and this probably propelled BTC into new highs, reaching ATH above $40k USD.

The list will consist from the investment groups and funds that published their involvement and total funds with them, without Grayscale, since that is a custodian for a large number of individual investors, which is arguably the biggest BTC holder at the moment with above 600k BTC at the moment, according to their website https://grayscale.co/bitcoin-trust/

May 2020 - Paul Tudor Jones
https://i.imgur.com/LmDcNa2.png

BVI Fund invested small part of their portfolio (there is no disclosure how much) into BTC, as a hedge from "The Great Monetary Inflation", and Tudor explained that BTC remains him on Gold, when he started investing business in 1976

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/11/paul-tudor-jones-calls-bitcoin-a-great-speculation-says-he-has-almost-2percent-of-his-assets-in-it.html

August 2020 - Microstrategy
https://i.imgur.com/PyOyT3Q.png

Microstrategy bought 21.454 BTC for $250 million, as their CEO Michael Saylor changed his mind regarding BTC, and became a Bitcoin maximalist, they added to the holdings two times, first buying for $175 million more BTC and then issuing convertible senior notes to purchase more BTC, for $650 million, with their final position amounts almost $1.1 billion USD spent and 70.470 BTC bought, which is above $2.5 billion at the moment

https://www.microstrategy.com/en/company/company-videos/microstrategy-announces-over-1b-in-total-bitcoin-purchases-in-2020
https://news.bitcoin.com/microstrategy-buys-29646-more-bitcoins-holds-over-1-billion-btc/
https://www.coindesk.com/microstrategy-buys-more-bitcoin

October 2020 - Square
https://i.imgur.com/egYYl0c.png

Square announced as well that they will buy BTC for their treasury and bought 4.709 BTC for $50 million

https://squareup.com/us/en/press/2020-bitcoin-investment

November 2020 - Stanley Druckenmiller

Stanley had an interview on CNBC and proclaimed that he own more gold than BTC, but that he thinks that "if the gold bet works, the bitcoin bet will probably work better"

https://www.coindesk.com/druckenmiller-invests-bitcoin

November 2020 - PayPal
https://i.imgur.com/WNmKmKX.png

PayPal announced in November that their users in US can buy BTC, among other three cryptocurrencies directly through-out their account, and, according to cryptoslate portal, they have bought BTC in amount of 70% newly minted BTC in November, through Ibit provider

https://www.reuters.com/article/paypal-cryptocurrency/update-1-paypal-to-open-up-network-to-cryptocurrencies-idUSL1N2HC0PL
https://cryptoslate.com/bitcoin-shortage-paypal-bought-70-of-all-mined-btc-last-month/

December 2020 - MassMutual
https://i.imgur.com/6hocFho.jpg

MassMutual, an insurance firm, first one of the kind, announced that they bought $100 million BTC for their general investment account. It is a small part of their portfolio, but first step into BTC world from one insurance firm

https://www.investopedia.com/decoding-insurance-giant-massmutuals-bitcoin-investment-5092586

December 2020 - Ruffer Investment
https://i.imgur.com/kotAIP5.jpg

On December 16, Ruffer Investment, UK based investment management fund bought $744 million into Bitcoin, indicating that they are hedging their much larger gold position
edit: 20210203 - their position is cut-down on half in BTC, same USD value, after having great gains during January

https://www.coindesk.com/ruffer-confirms-744m-bitcoin-investment

December 2020 - One River
https://i.imgur.com/XyvoaiN.png

One River announced that they bought over $600 million into BTC, and that they are planning to build up their position to $1 billion in near future, buying both BTC and ETH

https://news.bitcoin.com/1-billion-bitcoin-ether-one-river-hedge-fund-increase-holdings-600-million/
https://www.coindesk.com/one-river-digital-alan-howard-crypto-fund


Disclaimer: this is not an investment advise, just information list

20210114 - PayPal purchase added
20210203 - Ruffer sale activity added
20210208 - Tesla announced 1,5 billion USD holdings

Track the movements of big players and mutual funds. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5308801.0)

There was actually a lot of institutional money behind the past rallies as well, but it's different this time in that institutions are actually actively seeking to hold BTC in their proprietary trust as opposed to taking advantage of short term price fluctuations.

And you can see this from the fact that exchange balances are actually decreasing at a rapid rate despite the rally.

Institutions aren't as interested in speculating this time round. The likes of Ray Dalio have said that the current world order is very fragile, and BTC has now grown to be seen as a hedge against that as a long term asset.

Apart from that of Square and Microstrategy, I am just getting to know about the other institutions you have mentioned here; Tudor, Ruffer, Mass Mutual, and One River are still new to me. I have seen someone create a list like this and I don’t remember seeing them mention any of these ones that you have mentioned, so that shows that there are more to this.

I think you should do more research, there are still a lot of other companies that are investing in Bitcoin this year. Although I’ve never really liked the idea of these institutions because I prefer that Bitcoin is being by more individuals than institutions holding it in buck.

Interesting info even though it is listed elsewhere as exstasie posted.

Might be worth listing The Winklevoss Twins.

Also it would be nice to see those custodial investors seperately like
Grayscale as you noted and also Fidelity Investments, I'm sure there
are more, PayPal and Revolut perhaps.

The holding is the biggest change, because in the end we are talking about corporations that want to keep bitcoin and not sell theirs, that is a huge change from what we had in the years before, people bought bitcoin in bulk before as well but they ended up selling theirs very quickly when there was profit, we are talking about tens of thousands of bitcoins all bought to increase the price but decreased when all of them ended up selling bitcoin as well.

So, year was a lot different because we are talking about over half a million bitcoins all bought and not being sold on the market right now, don't know if grayscale will ever end up selling their coins, the more they hold it and the longer they hold it, the more money they will make, it is all about patience and who would be more patient than someone who has tens of billions of dollars.

yeah, I saw that there is several listings that comprise Institutional investors, but wanted to put a list that has recent inputs (from 2020) that probably influenced this spike in price
Winklevoss Twins are large investors, but I did not saw their recent investments, could you provide any link on that

PayPal is having good inputs as well, will try to figure out how much they bought since adoption, and put it into this list, thanks for comment

I don't mind if Bitcoin is used more by individuals or institutions, imo, that's the reason i have a proclivity to Bitcoin, I'm talking about the control, freedom of use by whatever or whoever party chooses to use it. This corporations adopting Bitcoin is definitely good for the network, not just in the price movement, but also for adoption. Having said that, Bitcoiners are prolly worried if this institutions sell off their Bitcoins, what's going to become of the price, but imo, it's not something to sweat over, there could be a plunge if that's to happen, but there have been many in the past, plus it's not possible for them all to pull out of the network at the same period in time; so Bitcoin would still find it's feet even if that happens.

I do not see "PayPal" on your list and I should think that they should be on top of the list....seeing that they are the trigger for most of these companies to start buying Bitcoin.

One of the first large companies to buy Bitcoin was Overstock under Patrick Byrne and they set the example for many other large companies to buy bitcoins.  ;)  

PayPal will soon be the company with the most bitcoins, even if the ownership is tracked on their own internal ledger system. (The trading is not done on the Blockchain)  ::)

could you provide some links for Overstock and PayPal holdings, and I will put them into the list, it is hard to find what amounts they have actually bought, but nevertheless, will add PayPal into the list, their move was really important for the industry, and other followed examples set by MicroStrategy and PayPal

edit: added PayPal to the list

That must be the reason that institutional investors become the talk of the town, they become a more proactive players in the bitcoin market. The balances getting lower is a pretty scary prospect for individuals that invest in bitcoin because they will be the first to be affected by a price dump or a hiccup that can cause panic amongst the bitcoin population. The good thing about this is that institutional investors as @magneto said is not interested in speculation but a long term hodl is a good indicator of price hike which I hope that it will be the case.

yeah, exactly

it seems that institutional investors are here to stay, and would not go out for short-term profit, which is certainly obtained by some of them (MicroStrategy earned from BTC more than their previous market capitalization on NASDAQ)
they are looking to buy and HODL as a hedge, same as Gold, and that is a strategic decision, not for a profit, especially from MassMutual, for example, whereas their profit would be small in comparison to their complete assets

as well, institutional investors do have to have regulated practice, and cannot buy and sell occasionally, they have some boards to consult first, and they will probably stay for a long time here

Ah ok I see that you are focusing on recent inputs, im not aware either
of the Winklevoss Twins expanding their Bitcoin holdings.

Publically listed companies have a process to go through before they can
make an official announcement so some of the news we hear is related to
Bitcoin aquisitions from December and November.


This article announces Guggenheim wants to get in on the action, should be worth
keeping an eye on, although news will break and we wont miss it.

As other have pointed out, there are many other thread on the forum trying to keep track of those.

Those, are for example, only the treads I personally decided to start:

Everything you wanted to know about Grayscale BTC Trust but were afraid to ask! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5256529)
MicroStrategy Buys $250M in Bitcoin, Calling the Crypto ‘Superior to Cash’ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5268108)
Fidelity President Files For New Bitcoin Fund (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5271567)
Winklevoss The Case for $500K Bitcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5272006.msg55082783#msg55082783)
Square invests 50 million USD in BTC: instrument of economic empowerment (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5280841)
Bitcoin Treasuries (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5280947)
 PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5283461)
Van Eck Launches a Bitcoin ETN on Xetra (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5293180.new#new)
Valour Launches World's First Fee-Free Bitcoin Exchange Traded Product (ETP) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5296191)
US Firm Launches Company-Sponsored Bitcoin Retirement Plans (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5291922.20)
SkyBridge launches SkyBridge Bitcoin Fund LP (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5307219)

The topic is indeed very hot, but I think it is justifiable as this phenomenon is a clear consequence of the Bitcoin evolving into the new #phase5 of it’s life: the best Treasury asset to invest in order to prepotente the real purchasing power.
Please feel free to use any relevant information you might find useful in the above threads.

So, welcome to the team, and let’s help each other tracking new Bitcoin investments!

^^ Yeah, hot topic as bitcoin's narrative has completely made a U-turn. No longer just an assets that we can trade in an exchange, but this huge companies are using it to hedge or as reserved assets now, pushing the price to a level that we have conquered. And it's just the beginning, there could be more just waiting for the perfect timing to join in the next 3-6 months.

Indeed, interesting times ahead.
As you know Grayscale yesterday resumed buying bitcoins.
They also published their 2020 Q4 investment report, amongst their impressive report, there is a very interesting piece of information: their view on the future of Bitcoin in 2021


Todays institutions are flocking to bitcoin, tomorrow States will.

The good thing about the Institutional investors buying Bitcoin is that they are long term investors unlike retail investors that looked at the screen every time. There is plus and minus of everything but the positive here is more than the negative.

indeed, already happening with Iran and Pakistan, that are in the process, Iran is subsidizing mining equipment for large farms, in a pursue to avoid sanctions on their banking system and one province in Pakistan is establishing their own mining farm (as to my knowledge, first state (province) owned Bitcoin mining farm)

https://decrypt.co/53918/pakistan-is-now-using-government-funds-to-mine-bitcoin

seems that West countries will follow the process, it is inevitable

Very unfortunate for a small time investors since Bitcoin will finally take over by those companies and will continue to manipulate the market. Well, the real idea of this one is to give access to those who don’t have bank accounts before but I think we grow a lot over the past decade and yeah, we must embrace this one. If you still don’t have Bitcoin better to grab some now before its too late, hopefully those whales will not dump Bitcoin on a one time big time.

Small time crypto users can still own some satoshis. Everyone is welcome to invest or hold bitcoin. That is the beauty of crypto. No one is labeled to be poor or rich. Names are not mentioned. Usually, just a group of people, like whales or entities like institutions. But you will not hear or read that this individual (with name) is the top bitcoin holder.

These institutions are the backbone of crypto space now. I believe more or less in PayPal to be honest because they are the spark for everyone and elon musk is real hero when I see bitcoin in the first place. He may not show up his true investments into bitcoin but he has put up so much money into it one can not believe it. Institutional investment comes from the share holders of that company which means we are securing large portion of money into bitcoin market and thus can assure bitcoin won’t fall unless these people take out their large amount of money out of it. This anyways impossible in the first place since they are long term holders too.

You forgot about grayscale too since they hold huge portion of btc too.

I know about Grayscale, I have put them already in preamble, since they are custodian, not Investment institution (a bit different), but yeah, their position is massive, and their influence is huge in the market
which is also good, is that they will not go away soon, they are here to stay, their customers pay premium to join, and it sounds very good so far (2020 was a main year for them), they also have LTC, ETH trusts as well, and they are buying huge amounts for their clients

according to Grayscale website - they have 649,459,500 Shares, with 0.00094934 BTC/Share, which amounts to cca. 617k BTC (17k more than five days ago, when I wrote the main article)

With the number of institutions investing in Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin is increasing. This is very good for the development of Bitcoin,
so it is not surprising that Bitcoin finally managed to hit the ATH price above $ 40,000. Of all the institutions investing in Bitcoin,
perhaps the most influential thing was when Paypal decided to invest in Bitcoin and gave access to US users can buy BTC. So since
November 2020 the Bitcoin price has increased dramatically until early January 2021. I hope that in 2021 there will be more institutions
investing in Bitcoin, so that the Bitcoin price can rise even higher.

however, take note that how PayPal is introducing bitcoin or crypto to their users is very different. but in any case, it is already a good intro to their users about crypto. and once they realised that there's more in store for them beyond PayPal, they will be strong users of crypto outside of their jurisdiction. but it's true, the launch of crypto in PayPal drives further adoption. after all, they have millions of users already.
and with regards to financial institutions, it seems that they are still buying. although we saw the drop to about 30k, and yet we are up again. seems that we will not drop below 30k this time. let's see.

Every time the price of bitcoin goes down I think that some firm is buying.
Bitcoin is at the best moment, now Bitcoin holders think of a long-term investment and more institutions are adopting bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset.

The positive in this situation is that the crypto market is optimistic and all the other coins are showing their progress.

It is appropriate to think of bitcoin users who need user-friendly dapps so that they can manage their bitcoin comfortably, easily, safely, quickly and with low fees.

Are you serious, what do you mean by it is impossible? Even if they are long term investors, long term is not a life time so these people can still pull their money out from the market at anytime and it will affect the market.

Unless what you should say is that by that time more and more individual/retail investors would have joined and invested their money and the community will grow enough before they think of removing their money from the market. That’s the only way that the community wouldn’t feel it. But as long as these institutions holds the highest share of the market, whenever they sell, the market will be affected.

They are smarter and also richer as well which allows them to wait a lot longer. A regular person who has invested 40 thousand dollars of his own money, when he has 50 thousand dollars on his savings account, sees bitcoin going towards 32 thousand dollars and he might panic and sell his coins to get out before he losses more money, that is how people think when they do not have too much money and act emotionally with their money.

However a huge company go into bitcoin, spend tens of millions of dollars on buying bitcoin, still has hundreds of millions of dollars aside, losing few million dollars due to drop is nothing to them, it is literally just bonus money for some executives, nothing major for them which allows them to wait it out and see the price go back up again and not act emotionally during any fall. That is why they are going to get richer from crypto and they know it, and it is spreading among the big companies.

Well, I do assure you many executives have a lot of pressure on them about the correctness of their choices. Actually, the short term correctness of their choices.
Do you remember when Elon Musk wanted to take TSLA private at 420? This was to focus on the long term success of his firm, without worrying too much about the quarterly reporting cycle.
I think it is not a coincidence if the first and only firm that bought BTC has been Microstrategy, where the CEO has a 70%+  voting supermajority: even if BTC dips for a quarter or two (Something cannot be ruled out) he is not risking his position.

They may not really end up with a lot more like this year, I am not expecting another half a million bitcoins sold this year and hopefully they do not corner the market completely. Think about it this way, if the huge companies have 10 million bitcoins, if satoshi and all early birds that do not sell have few million, if combined hodlers have few million, that would leave very little bitcoins to trade and that is what I think is the real trouble here, if there is a very limited amount, that would destroy the market.

Everyone thinks that if there is less supply but a lot of demand the price should go up, but when there is a lot of demand yet no supply people will start to go away due to lack of supply and find other things that does have supply. So I hope companies to keep on buying but not a lot, not millions of them, just few ten thousand bitcoin is more than enough.

https://ambcrypto.com/miami-mayor-explores-idea-to-put-1-treasury-reserves-into-bitcoin/

Miami is considering putting 1% of their treasury into BTC, which is rather another good news and institutional acceptance, and here we are talking about USA

It is good news that every time we see companies add Bitcoin to their portfolios. It will give Bitcoin its true value in the future if those companies hold on to their Bitcoin investments. At the same time, it is scary that all those bitcoins will be held in several hands. We can expect from Elon Musk to add some cryptocurrencies to its portfolio soon.

Just reading an article from Friday about Blockfi applying to the SEC for A Bitcoin Fund
to compete with Grayscale etc.


From the article they also mention OSPREY and VALKYRIE who have recently entered the game.

These could be something for your list?
The space is opening up because of the demand from Institutional Investors who dont want
to have to take "ownership" of their Bitcoin, just like if they buy Gold or Oil, they dont expect to
have it physically in their possesion.

Good to know that more and more Institutionals in the game. However, even more of them are shorting btc according to stats

with all the positive news, there is one that call caution on Institutional investments, namely Ruffer sold part of their holdings in BTC, since earning double in a month, and now have risk-free position, mainly the same as investment (750 million USD), although having half BTC quantity, compared to initial buying

https://decrypt.co/56437/ruffer-scores-750-million-profit-from-bitcoin-citing-immediate-fireworks

they were happy with gains, and decided to cut-down their risk, with pulling-out initial capital, easing buying pressure and increasing selling pressure in January, what do you think will the other Institutional investors, that already made money follow this example, or they will stay in for the matter?

Pandemic has helped them to think out of the box and rather than just investing in traditional assets and method they have started considering bitcoin as a good option now. This will help them to diversify and bitcoin will get the boost as now considering few institutions have purchased other would follow the same.

Not really thinking out of the box, these institutions just observed how fast this technology's popularity is spreading across different countries, and they just made use or took advantage of it, by engaging as a third party network securing taxation in every transaction by means of higher fees, compared to traditional exchangers. But it is somewhat of a win-win situation. They will benefit from "adopting" this technology, while this industry will benefit in a way that these platforms will help spreading and enlarging the trust to use cryptocurrencies. Hoping that someday, more people will benefit from the use of this technology.

This means that the market is mature enough to accept bitcoin as an investment asset. There are many factors here, and the most important thing is that the coming pandemic, the associated increased pumping of the money supply by the states, made more and more investors think about finding an investment object to protect against inflation. Let's hope that the wall of distrust has already been broken and bitcoin will hold this won market niche.

Keep editing it :)

I think there will be more institutional investors and mutual funds every month. Crypto is trending now. And the price will go only in one direction!

I have repeatedly come across information that the Chicago stock exchange is deliberately creating Ethereum futures trading, in which institutional capital is interested, as well as Bitcoin. I believe that this fact also has a very good effect on the growth and development of the cryptocurrency market.

it is probably all heard already, but Tesla reportedly bought 1,5 billion in BTC, according to their filling to SEC
https://decrypt.co/56957/elon-musks-tesla-has-invested-1-5-billion-into-bitcoin

as well, they will accept BTC payments for Tesla cars in near future

important milestone, and as said by Hirsch from eToro this could be the moment when we realized BTC goes mainstream

one more Investor is publicly with BTC, Ukranian Monobank co-founder Oleg Gorokhovsky announced that he has holdings in BTC, and targets $100k price in this or next year
https://decrypt.co/57259/monobank-co-founder-invests-in-bitcoin-predicting-100000-price-target

seems that more and more Investors are announcing their involvement with BTC, and this year could provide healthy growth for the network and price should come afterwards, there is much uprising price pressure in whole crypto industry, which is not that good, since the rise is too fast for my taste, but it is always better to look at green, than red charts

Because it was triggered up by the richest man on earth right now so for sure the other big institutional investors will be hyped and put a investment on bitcoins. But I wonder on what will happen to them if bitcoins drop down and will not meet there expected target, I hope they know on when to do the cut loss since if not provably they cry and file a bankruptcy.