BlackRock names Citi, Citadel, Goldman Sachs as bitcoin buyers for its ETF

BlackRock has revealed the names of four more Wall Street firms it's enlisting to buy bitcoin for its iShares Bitcoin BTC -2.010% Trust ETF.

Citi, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Citadel have joined JP Morgan and Jane Street as authorized participants for the world's largest asset manager's spot bitcoin ETF, according to an amendment filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday to the ETF's Form S-1 .

An Authorized Participant (AP) is an entity that acquires the underlying assets of an ETF (such as bitcoin in this context) to create its shares, providing the liquidity of the ETF market. U.S.-listed ETFs have, on average, 24 “contracted” APs and five “active” APs, BlackRock's website shows .

The exact timing of the firms’ recognition as authorized participants remains unclear. BlackRock was not immediately available to respond to The Block’s request for comment.

Institutions 'ashamed'?

According to Eric Balchunas, a senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, one possibility is that the firms were providing liquidity for the ETFs for several weeks without publicly declaring their participation in the funds due to the stigma attached to the cryptocurrency industry.

The timing of the firms’ coming out as APs might serve as a sign of their shifting attitudes toward the industry, Balchunas said Friday in a post on X.

Balchunas said the investment firms “were [possibly] ashamed before [bitcoin’s resurgence] to be ID-ed (as authorized participants of spot bitcoin ETFs), but are now cool… likely a result of the ETFs' mega-flows/success.”

Institutional investors are increasingly participating in spot bitcoin ETFs as a surge in bitcoin’s price fuels investors’ appetite for crypto. The funds’ collective trading volume stood at roughly $190 billion as of Thursday.

As the popularity of spot bitcoin ETFs has skyrocketed, so has the underlying asset's price. Bitcoin is trading at $67,792 as of the time of writing, The Block's price data shows . Its price has risen more than 40% since the day before the first rash of spot bitcoin ETF applications received regulatory approval in the U.S.

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