Goldman Sachs Applies for Bitcoin ETF—Wall Street’s Last Bastion Has Fallen

By Xiao Bing, TechFlow

September 12, 2017, New York—CNBC Institutional Investor Conference.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, stood onstage and declared to the room full of fund managers: “Bitcoin is a fraud—worse than the tulip bubble. Anyone trading bitcoin at JPMorgan will be fired on the spot—for two reasons: violating company policy, and being stupid.”

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

Nine years later, on April 14, 2026, Goldman Sachs filed an application with the SEC for the Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Premium Income ETF. Six days earlier, Morgan Stanley’s spot bitcoin ETF (MSBT) had just listed, attracting $34 million in assets on its first day, with an expense ratio of 0.14%.

On that same day, Kevin Warsh—the Federal Reserve chair nominee selected by Donald Trump—submitted a 69-page financial disclosure document listing investments in Polymarket, Solana, Tenderly (an Ethereum development platform), and Flashnet (a bitcoin Lightning Network startup).

All three events occurred within one week.

Wall Street’s attitude toward bitcoin has shifted—from “This is a scam” to “We’ll build and sell our own products”—over precisely nine years.

Not a Spot ETF—What Is Goldman Selling?

First, a detail widely overlooked by the market: Goldman Sachs’ latest filing is not for a spot bitcoin ETF.

It is for a “premium income” ETF whose core strategy is covered call options. Put simply, the fund holds shares of spot bitcoin ETFs (primarily BlackRock’s IBIT) while simultaneously selling call options to collect option premiums, which are distributed to investors as regular dividends. The call coverage ratio ranges between 40% and 100%.

What does this mean? If bitcoin surges, your upside is capped; if bitcoin trades sideways or rises modestly, you earn more than holding bitcoin outright—thanks to the additional income from option premiums.

Goldman’s choice of product structure reveals its target clientele with surgical precision: not retail investors chasing 10x returns, but institutional allocators managing hundreds of millions—or even billions—of dollars. These funds need a rationale to enter bitcoin—not “faith,” but “yield.”

Goldman’s ETF is effectively saying: Bitcoin’s volatility itself is a monetizable asset. You don’t need to bet on direction—you only need to acknowledge that the market is sufficiently liquid and active for option sellers to profit.

This logic mirrors that of BlackRock’s upcoming BITA ETF, which also employs a covered call strategy to convert bitcoin’s volatility into monthly income. The key difference lies in execution: BlackRock leverages IBIT—a $55 billion behemoth—as its liquidity backbone, whereas Goldman avoids direct bitcoin exposure entirely, instead holding spot ETF shares indirectly via a Cayman Islands subsidiary to comply with regulatory constraints.

Two Wall Street titans, converging almost simultaneously on the same product category, suggest one thing clearly: The battle over spot bitcoin ETFs is over. The next war is over who can best repackage bitcoin into products traditional asset management clients understand—and trust.

From Buying Others’ Products to Building Their Own: Goldman’s Nine-Year Pivot

Zooming out, Goldman Sachs’ evolving stance on crypto ranks among Wall Street’s most dramatic turnarounds.

In 2021, Goldman relaunched its cryptocurrency trading desk, offering clients bitcoin futures and options. At the time, the entire industry was still cloaking cautious interest behind platitudes like, “We’re focused on blockchain technology—not bitcoin.”

By late 2024 and early 2025, Goldman’s 13F filings began revealing its true position. As of Q4 2024, Goldman held $1.57 billion in spot bitcoin ETF shares—$1.27 billion in BlackRock’s IBIT and $288 million in Fidelity’s FBTC—a staggering 121% increase quarter-on-quarter.

By Q4 2025, its 13F disclosure showed Goldman held approximately 13,741 bitcoins across various spot bitcoin ETFs—valued then at roughly $1.71 billion. Even more striking: it also held around $1 billion in Ethereum ETFs, $153 million in XRP ETFs, and $108 million in Solana ETFs. CEO David Solomon was invited to speak at the World Liberty Financial Forum.

From buying others’ products to launching its own for sale to clients—Goldman made the leap in under two years.

Morgan Stanley: 16,000 Wealth Advisors Are Its Greatest Weapon

Morgan Stanley moved faster—and more aggressively.

MSBT launched on NYSE Arca on April 8, becoming the first spot bitcoin ETF issued directly by a major U.S. bank. With a 0.14% fee—11 basis points cheaper than BlackRock’s IBIT—it launched straight into a price war.

Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg’s ETF analyst, ranked MSBT’s debut performance among the “top 1% of all ETF launches,” forecasting $5 billion in assets under management within a year.

But MSBT’s real edge isn’t its fee—it’s its distribution network. Morgan Stanley employs 16,000 wealth advisors managing $9.3 trillion in client assets. Previously, those advisors could only recommend third-party bitcoin ETFs; now they can push their own.

More importantly, Morgan Stanley has advised clients to allocate 2%–4% of their portfolios to crypto. When a platform overseeing $9.3 trillion issues such guidance—even if only a fraction of clients act on it—the capital inflow into crypto becomes astronomical.

Morgan Stanley also plans to launch spot trading for bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana on E*Trade in H1 2026, and has already filed applications for Ethereum and Solana trusts. This isn’t dipping a toe in—it’s full immersion.

Brett Tejpaul, Co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, put it succinctly: “This marks the second wave of digital asset adoption.”

The first wave arrived in 2024 with spot ETF approvals, channeling capital through ETFs. The second wave sees banks entering the arena directly—embedding crypto assets into the full spectrum of traditional wealth management.

The Secret in the 69-Page Document: The Next Fed Chair Invested in Polymarket and Solana

Yet the most intriguing news this week may not be Goldman or Morgan Stanley—but Kevin Warsh’s 69-page financial disclosure.

Warsh, Trump’s nominee to succeed Jerome Powell—who steps down in May—filed his OGE Form 278e on April 14. Buried inside is a startling investment list: stakes in Blast (an Ethereum L2 network), Polymarket (a decentralized prediction market), Flashnet (a bitcoin Lightning Network startup), Tenderly (an Ethereum development platform), and Bitwise (an asset manager operating a spot bitcoin ETF). Through DCM Investments and AVF fund structures, Warsh holds positions across DeFi lending, decentralized derivatives, L1/L2 networks, prediction markets, and bitcoin payment infrastructure.

Though most positions are small (per OGE rules, unlisted amounts indicate values below $1,000), and Warsh has pledged to divest all holdings upon confirmation, the signal is unmistakable: the person poised to steer U.S. monetary policy isn’t passively holding bitcoin in a brokerage account—he’s actively seeking out and investing in the most cutting-edge protocols and infrastructure across the crypto ecosystem.

Warsh has previously called bitcoin “an important asset” and “a good cop for policy”—a warning signal when the Fed falls behind the inflation curve. Michael Saylor predicts he’ll become “the first bitcoin-friendly Fed chair.”

Had that statement been made in September 2017—right after Jamie Dimon called bitcoin a “fraud”—it would likely have been dismissed as delusional rambling.

Wall Street Has No Faith—Only Ledgers

Lay these three developments side-by-side, and the picture snaps into focus.

Wall Street never acts on “faith.” Every move it makes stems from one motive: profit. When institutions act in concert, they aren’t seeing bitcoin’s philosophical significance—they’re seeing a $1-trillion annual trading volume asset class, with volatility persistently above 60%, a maturing options market, and the fees, commissions, and structured product premiums that can be extracted from it.

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 floor; Goldman’s and BlackRock’s income-oriented ETFs will compete fiercely for conservative capital seeking yield without full volatility exposure. Bitcoin’s on-ramps are widening.

In the medium term, as Wall Street builds yield-focused products around bitcoin, it’s effectively reclassifying bitcoin—from “speculative asset” to “alternative yield asset.” That will draw in pension funds, insurance capital, and university endowments previously scared off by “excessive volatility.” Once that capital enters, it rarely exits.

In the long term, when the Fed chair nominee’s portfolio includes Polymarket and Solana—and when Wall Street’s proudest firms race to issue bitcoin ETFs—the question “Is bitcoin a legitimate asset?” no longer requires an answer.

The question has changed: Where do you stand in this new order?

In 2017, Jamie Dimon said he’d fire anyone trading bitcoin at JPMorgan. In 2026, his peers are rushing to sell bitcoin to every customer who walks into a bank branch.

Wall Street has no faith—only ledgers. When the numbers on those ledgers grow large enough, any belief will shift.