Author: Blockchain Knight

In the fourth quarter of 2025, Bitcoin's price initially rose and then fell. After reaching a historic high of $126,000 in October, it experienced a significant drop due to a $20 billion large-scale deleveraging event, ending the year below $90,000, with its market value shrinking by nearly a quarter.

However, regulatory documents indicate that institutional investment managers did not take this opportunity to exit; instead, they viewed the pullback as a buying opportunity, increasing their holdings in U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, showing a significant divergence between rising share quantities and declining asset values.

Analysis of Bitcoin ETF 13F filings shows that 121 institutions net increased their holdings in various spot Bitcoin ETFs by 892,610 shares during the period from Q3 to Q4 of 2025.

Specifically, the total number of institutional shares increased from 5,252,364 shares in Q3 to 6,144,974 shares in Q4, an increase of approximately 17%.

However, due to the Bitcoin pullback, the total market value of these holdings decreased from $317.8 million to $298.6 million, a reduction of $19.2 million, corresponding to an implied average value per ETF share dropping from $60.50 to $48.60, a decline of 19.7%.

A typical case is Dartmouth College's $9 billion endowment fund, which during this period purchased $15 million worth of BlackRock's IBIT fund and Grayscale's Ethereum fund, confirming institutional interest in crypto ETFs.

This divergence is particularly evident in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

In 2025, despite clients experiencing a 10% loss, IBIT still attracted $25.4 billion in new inflows, ranking as the sixth highest in net inflows among U.S. ETFs, surpassing established products like Invesco QQQ Trust and SPDR Gold Trust.

The Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise noted that 99% of advisors holding cryptocurrencies plan to maintain or increase their investment amounts in 2025, dispelling market concerns about "institutions exiting during volatility."

It is important to note that institutional increases are not all long-term allocations and may imply arbitrage behavior.

According to State Street Bank data, the U.S. Bitcoin ETF market size reached $103 billion, with institutions holding nearly a quarter of the circulating shares, and 60% of institutions preferring ETFs over physical Bitcoin.

However, 13F filings only disclose long positions and do not reveal short positions, obscuring hedge funds' basis trading strategies, which involve buying ETFs while shorting Bitcoin futures to profit from the price difference between spot and futures, without bearing directional risk on Bitcoin.

If the increases are driven by arbitrage, funds may reverse as the price difference narrows or volatility increases; if for long-term allocation, then stability is stronger.

Regardless of the motivation, the core fact is very clear: during Bitcoin's significant pullback in Q4, the scale of Bitcoin-related ETFs held by Wall Street actually expanded.

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