Written by: Xiao Bing, Shen Chao TechFlow

On September 12, 2017, in New York, at the CNBC Institutional Investor Conference.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, stood on stage and threw a statement to all the fund managers: "Bitcoin is a scam, even worse than the tulip bubble. Anyone trading Bitcoin at JPMorgan, I will fire them immediately, for two reasons: violating regulations and being stupid."

That day, Bitcoin fell 2%, closing at $4,106.

Nine years later, on April 14, 2026, Goldman Sachs submitted an application to the SEC for the Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Premium Income ETF. Just six days earlier, Morgan Stanley's spot Bitcoin ETF (MSBT) had just launched, raising $34 million on its first day with a fee rate of 0.14%.

On the same day, Kevin Warsh, the Fed chair nominee nominated by Trump, submitted a 69-page financial disclosure document, which prominently listed investments in Polymarket, Solana, the Ethereum development platform Tenderly, and the Bitcoin Lightning Network startup Flashnet.

Within a week, three things happened simultaneously.

Wall Street's attitude toward Bitcoin changed from "this is a scam" to "we make products to sell," taking a full nine years.

Not a spot ETF, what is Goldman selling?

First, let’s discuss a detail overlooked by the market: Goldman is not applying for a spot Bitcoin ETF this time.

They are applying for a "premium income-type" ETF, whose core strategy is covered call options. Simply put, the fund holds shares of a spot Bitcoin ETF (mainly BlackRock’s IBIT), while selling call options to collect premiums and regularly distributing dividends to investors. The coverage ratio for the sold options fluctuates between 40% to 100%.

What does this mean? If Bitcoin skyrockets, you can only earn a portion; if Bitcoin remains flat or rises slightly, you earn more than just holding Bitcoin, thanks to the additional income from premiums.

Goldman’s choice of this product form precisely reveals its customer profile: not those retail investors hoping for tenfold gains from Bitcoin, but institutional funds managing hundreds of millions or even tens of billions of dollars. These funds need a reason to enter Bitcoin, and that reason cannot be “faith,” it must be “yield.”

Goldman's ETF essentially states: The volatility of Bitcoin itself is a realizable asset. You don’t need to bet on direction; you just need to acknowledge that this market is active enough for option sellers to make money.

This idea is very similar to BlackRock’s upcoming BITA. BITA also follows a covered call strategy and turns Bitcoin volatility into monthly dividends. The difference is that BlackRock has the $55 billion IBIT as liquidity support, while Goldman chooses to indirectly hold spot ETF shares through a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands to circumvent regulatory constraints.

These two Wall Street giants, almost simultaneously focusing on the same product track, seemingly indicate one thing: The battle for the Bitcoin spot ETF is over; the next battle is "who can package Bitcoin into a product that traditional asset management clients can understand."

From buying others' products to creating their own: Goldman Sachs' nine-year turnaround

Looking at the timeline, Goldman Sachs’ change of attitude towards cryptocurrency is one of the most dramatic turnarounds on Wall Street.

In 2021, Goldman restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk, beginning to provide Bitcoin futures and options trading for clients. At that time, the entire industry was still using phrases like "we focus on blockchain technology, not on Bitcoin" to vaguely express "I want to touch it but dare not say" sentiments.

By the end of 2024 to early 2025, Goldman’s 13F filings began to reveal their true nature. By the end of the fourth quarter of 2024, Goldman held $1.57 billion worth of Bitcoin ETF shares, with $1.27 billion in BlackRock's IBIT and $288 million in Fidelity's FBTC, a staggering increase of 121% from the previous quarter.

By the fourth quarter of 2025, Goldman disclosed in its 13F filing that it indirectly held about 13,741 Bitcoins through various spot Bitcoin ETFs, valued at approximately $1.71 billion at that time. Even more remarkably, it simultaneously held about $1 billion in Ethereum ETFs, $153 million in XRP ETFs, and $108 million in Solana ETFs. CEO David Solomon was also invited to speak at the World Liberty Financial Forum.

From buying others' products to making products to sell to others, Goldman took less than two years.

Morgan Stanley: 16,000 financial advisors are the biggest weapon

Morgan Stanley's pace is faster and more aggressive.

MSBT was listed on the NYSE Arca on April 8, becoming the first spot Bitcoin ETF directly issued by a large commercial bank in U.S. history. With a fee of 0.14%, it was 11 basis points cheaper than BlackRock's IBIT, immediately sparking a price war upon launch.

Bloomberg's ETF analyst Eric Balchunas rated MSBT’s first-day performance as "among the top 1% of all ETF issuances," predicting that its asset management scale could reach $5 billion within a year.

However, the real weapon of MSBT is not its fee but its distribution network. Morgan Stanley has 16,000 wealth management advisors managing $9.3 trillion in client assets. Previously, these advisors could only recommend third-party Bitcoin ETFs, but now they can directly promote their own products.

More importantly, Morgan Stanley has begun to advise clients to allocate 2% to 4% of their portfolios to cryptocurrency. When a platform managing $9.3 trillion makes such an allocation recommendation, even if only a small portion of clients act on it, the funds flowing into the crypto market will be astronomical.

Morgan Stanley also plans to open spot trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana through E*Trade in the first half of 2026, and has already submitted applications for Ethereum and Solana trusts. This is not just a test; this is a comprehensive rollout.

Brett Tejpaul, co-CEO of Coinbase's institutional business, said a very accurate statement: "This marks the second wave of digital asset adoption."

The first wave was the approval of spot ETFs in 2024, with funds flooding in through ETF channels; the second wave is banks themselves entering the product-making stage, embedding crypto assets into the entire chain of traditional wealth management.

The secret in the 69-page document: the next Fed chair invested in Polymarket and Solana

But the most interesting news this week may not be Goldman or Morgan Stanley, but the 69-page financial disclosure from Kevin Warsh.

Warsh is Trump's nominee for the next Federal Reserve chair, planned to succeed Jerome Powell, who will step down in May. His 69-page OGE 278e form was submitted on April 14, containing a jaw-dropping investment list: investments in the Ethereum L2 network Blast, in the decentralized prediction market Polymarket, equity in the Bitcoin Lightning Network startup Flashnet, investment in Tenderly (an Ethereum development platform), and prior investments in Bitwise (which manages a spot Bitcoin ETF). Through DCM Investments and the AVF series fund structure, Warsh has made extensive investments in DeFi lending, decentralized derivatives, L1 and L2 networks, prediction markets, and Bitcoin payment infrastructure.

Although most of these positions are small (under OGE rules, projects without marked amounts mean values below $1,000), and Warsh has committed to liquidating all positions once confirmed, the signal is very strong: the person about to oversee U.S. monetary policy is not passively holding a bit of Bitcoin in a brokerage account but actively seeking out and investing in the most cutting-edge protocols and infrastructure in the crypto ecosystem.

Warsh has publicly stated that Bitcoin is "an important asset," a "good policeman of policy," signaling when the Fed lags behind the inflation curve. Michael Saylor predicts he will become "the first Bitcoin-friendly Federal Reserve chair."

If this statement had been made on the afternoon of 2017 when Jamie Dimon said, "Bitcoin is a scam," it would have been regarded as the ramblings of a madman.

Wall Street has no faith, only balance sheets

When looking at these three events together, the picture becomes clear.

Wall Street never does anything out of "faith." The only reason for every action it takes is profit. When these institutions act collectively, they do not see the philosophical significance of Bitcoin, but rather an asset class with annual trading volume in the trillions, volatility consistently above 60%, an increasingly mature options market, and the management fees, trading commissions, and structured product premiums that can be collected around this asset class.

What does this mean for retail investors?

In the short term, more ETFs mean fiercer fee wars. MSBT's 0.14% has already lowered the industry's bottom line, and Goldman and BlackRock's income-generating ETFs will further vie for conservative funds that "want yield but do not want to bear all the volatility." The entry points for funds into Bitcoin are widening.

In the medium term, as Wall Street begins to build income-generating products around Bitcoin, it is essentially redefining Bitcoin from a "speculative asset" to an "alternative income asset." This will attract a large batch of pension funds, insurance funds, and university endowments that were previously scared off by "too much volatility." Once this money comes in, it is unlikely to go out.

In the long term, when the investment portfolio of a Fed chair candidate contains Polymarket and Solana, and when the two most arrogant investment banks on Wall Street compete to issue Bitcoin ETF products, the question of "whether Bitcoin is a legitimate asset" no longer needs to be answered.

The question becomes: on which side do you stand in this new order?

In 2017, Jamie Dimon said, "I will fire employees trading Bitcoin." In 2026, his peers are rushing to sell Bitcoin to every customer walking through the bank door.

Wall Street has no faith, only balance sheets. When the numbers on the balance sheets get big enough, any faith will change.