Nation States, Pensions, and Banks Want Bitcoin

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To investors,

There was an explosion of news today highlighting how quickly bitcoin adoption is accelerating. First, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund revealed in a regulatory filing they own $436 million worth of Blackrock’s bitcoin ETF.

This is a big deal because we now have another nation state publicly disclosing their bitcoin ownership. Not only is Abu Dhabi an important global player, but they have one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world.

Bitcoiners have ben predicting nation state adoption for more than a decade. Critics brushed off countries like El Salvador or Bhutan because they were “too small” or they “didn’t count.” It is going to be nearly impossible to brush off Abu Dhabi.

Next, Wisconsin’s pension investment board revealed in their own regulatory filing an increase in their bitcoin holdings — the fund went from 2.9 million shares in IBIT to 6 million shares. This equates to approximately $321 million of bitcoin exposure or close to 1% of the fund’s assets.

As many of you know, my partners and I secured the first public pension fund investment in history to go buy bitcoin. It was a novel idea at the time and there was immense brain damage to get the investment done. People were scared of this new asset they didn’t understand. You can’t blame them.

But seeing the Wisconsin pension fund increase their stake suggests that conviction is building within the organization. An increasing price can do that, but so can an investment in educating members of the board. Buying your initial stake of bitcoin was impressive — doubling down is where the best fund managers will separate themselves from their peers.

These two revelations would make for a crazy day. But there is more being announced.

A new report from Yueqi Yang at The Information explains how BNY Mellon, Citi, and State Street are all planning to offer crypto custody products to the market. Some organizations are focused on bitcoin, while others are focused on all crypto assets. One area of agreement seems to be on tokenized assets. For example, Citi conducted an experiment to custody tokenized private equity funds. The success of that project led them to invest in a broader effort.

I continue to say that 2025 will be the year that banks embrace bitcoin and crypto assets. These organization understand that bitcoin and crypto will bring them new customers, new assets, and new revenue. That is all they needed to hear — the banks are interested in playing ball.

Historically, the bank regulators were not enthusiastic about this idea. That is changing with the new administration as well. As one example, President Trump just nominated Jonathan Gould, the former Chief Legal Officer at Bitfury, to be the next head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

So we have nation states buying bitcoin, state pension funds increasing their bitcoin holdings, major Wall Street banks preparing to custody bitcoin, and bitcoin-friendly regulators being appointed. You would think we were in a bear market according to the sentiment online, but all this progress is almost getting tiring. Almost.

This is what winning feels like. We still have a long way to go though. This is a multi-decade long journey. And I feel fortunate to be on the trip with the rest of you.

Hope you all had a great week. I’ll talk to everyone next week.

- Anthony Pompliano

Founder & CEO, Professional Capital Management

This Company Buying Bitcoin Outperformed Every Stock In The World

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss how Metaplanet continues to buy bitcoin, what is so special about their strategy, bitcoin market, what the most important thing is for the price, taxes, tariffs, how they are connected, and how Robinhood is changing financial markets.

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