Goldman Sachs Applies for Bitcoin ETF, Wall Street’s Last Bastion Falls

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

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon stood on stage and threw out a statement to the room full of fund managers: “Bitcoin is a fraud, worse than the tulip bubble. I would fire anyone at JPMorgan who trades bitcoin, for two reasons: it’s against our rules, and they’re stupid.”

That day, Bitcoin fell 2%, trading 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 on its first day with a fee of 0.14%.

On the same day, Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve Chair, submitted a 69-page financial disclosure document, which prominently listed investments in Polymarket, Solana, Ethereum development platform Tenderly, and Bitcoin Lightning Network startup Flashnet.

Three events occurred within a single week.

Wall Street’s attitude towards Bitcoin took a full nine years to shift from “this is a fraud” to “we make and sell our own products.”

Not a Spot ETF, What is Goldman Sachs Selling?

First, a detail the market overlooked: Goldman Sachs is not applying for a spot Bitcoin ETF this time.

It is applying for a “Premium Income” ETF, with a core strategy of covered calls. Simply put, the fund holds shares of spot Bitcoin ETFs (primarily BlackRock’s IBIT) while simultaneously selling call options, collecting option premiums, and periodically distributing dividends to investors. The option coverage ratio floats between 40% and 100%.

What does this mean? If Bitcoin surges, you only capture part of the gains; if Bitcoin trades sideways or rises modestly, you earn more than just holding Bitcoin, thanks to the extra income from option premiums.

Goldman’s choice of this product structure precisely reveals its target client profile: not retail investors hoping for a tenfold return on Bitcoin, but institutional allocators managing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. This money needs a reason to enter Bitcoin, and that reason cannot be “belief”; it must be “yield.”

Goldman’s ETF essentially says: Bitcoin’s volatility itself is an asset that can be monetized. You don’t need to bet on the direction; you just need to acknowledge that this market is active enough for option sellers to profit.

This thinking aligns perfectly with BlackRock’s upcoming BITA. BITA also employs a covered call strategy, turning Bitcoin’s volatility into monthly dividends. The difference is that BlackRock has the $55 billion giant IBIT as its liquidity backbone, while Goldman Sachs chooses not to hold Bitcoin directly, instead holding spot ETF shares indirectly through a Cayman Islands subsidiary to navigate regulatory constraints.

Two Wall Street giants simultaneously locking onto the same product niche seems to indicate one thing: the war for spot Bitcoin ETFs is over. The next war is “who can package Bitcoin into a product traditional asset management clients understand.”

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

Looking at the extended timeline, Goldman Sachs’ shift in attitude towards cryptocurrency is one of Wall Street’s most dramatic pivots.

In 2021, Goldman restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk, beginning to offer Bitcoin futures and options trading to clients. Back then, the entire industry was still using phrases like “we are focused on blockchain technology, not Bitcoin” to express the ambiguity of “we want to touch it but dare not say it.”

From late 2024 to early 2025, Goldman’s 13F filings began to reveal its true stance. As of Q4 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 121% increase from the previous quarter.

By the Q4 2025 13F disclosure, Goldman indirectly held approximately 13,741 Bitcoin through various spot Bitcoin ETFs, valued at around $1.71 billion at the time. More astonishingly, it also held about $1 billion in Ethereum ETFs, $153 million in XRP ETF, and $108 million in Solana ETF. CEO David Solomon was also invited to speak at the World Liberty Financial forum.

It took Goldman less than two years to go from buying others’ products to making and selling their own.

Morgan Stanley: 16,000 Financial Advisors Are Its Biggest Weapon

Morgan Stanley’s pace is faster and more aggressive.

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

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas rated MSBT’s first-day performance as “top 1% of all ETF launches,” predicting assets under management could reach $5 billion within a year.

But MSBT’s real weapon isn’t the fee; it’s the 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; now they can push their own product.

More importantly, Morgan Stanley has already advised clients to allocate 2% to 4% of their investment portfolios to cryptocurrency. When a platform managing $9.3 trillion gives such allocation advice, even if only a small fraction of clients follow it, the capital flowing into the crypto market is astronomical.

Morgan Stanley also plans to open spot trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana via E*Trade in the first half of 2026 and has already filed applications for Ethereum and Solana trusts. This isn’t a test; it’s a full-scale rollout.

Coinbase Institutional co-CEO Brett Tejpaul made an 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 the ETF channel. The second wave is banks themselves entering the fray, embedding crypto assets into the complete 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 might not be Goldman or Morgan Stanley, but Kevin Warsh’s 69-page financial disclosure.

Warsh is Trump’s nominee for the next Federal Reserve Chair, slated to replace Jerome Powell, who steps down in May. His 69-page OGE 278e form, submitted on April 14, contains a staggering investment list: an investment in Ethereum L2 network Blast, an investment in decentralized prediction market Polymarket, equity in Bitcoin Lightning Network startup Flashnet, an investment in Tenderly (an Ethereum development platform), and a prior investment in Bitwise (an asset management company running a spot Bitcoin ETF).

Through DCM Investments and AVF series fund structures, Warsh has made broad investments across DeFi lending, decentralized derivatives, L1 and L2 networks, prediction markets, and Bitcoin payment infrastructure.

While most of these positions are small (under OGE rules, unlabeled amounts mean value below $1,000) and Warsh has pledged to divest all upon confirmation, the signaling is powerful: the person poised to oversee U.S. monetary policy isn’t passively holding some Bitcoin in a brokerage account but is actively seeking out and investing in the most cutting-edge protocols and infrastructure within the crypto ecosystem.

Warsh has previously stated publicly that Bitcoin is “an important asset,” a “good cop on policy,” signaling when the Fed falls behind the inflation curve. Michael Saylor predicted he would become “the first pro-Bitcoin Fed Chair.”

If this statement had been made on that afternoon in 2017 when Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud, it would likely have been dismissed as the ramblings of a madman.

Wall Street Has No Faith, Only Ledgers

Overlaying these three events makes the picture clear.

Wall Street never does anything out of “faith.” It does everything for one reason only: profit. When these institutions act collectively, they don’t see Bitcoin’s philosophical significance. They see an asset class with annual trading volume in the trillions, volatility consistently above 60%, a maturing options market, and the management fees, trading commissions, and structured product premiums that can be charged 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 floor. Goldman and BlackRock’s income ETFs will further compete for conservative capital that “wants yield but not full volatility.” Bitcoin’s funding channels are widening.

In the medium term, as Wall Street begins building yield products around Bitcoin, it is effectively redefining Bitcoin from a “speculative asset” to an “alternative yield asset.” This will attract a host of pension funds, insurance capital, and university endowments previously scared off by “excessive volatility.” Once this money comes in, it’s unlikely to leave.

In the long term, when a Fed Chair candidate’s portfolio includes Polymarket and Solana, when Wall Street’s two most arrogant investment banks race to issue Bitcoin ETF products, the question “Is Bitcoin a legitimate asset?” no longer needs answering.

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

In 2017, Jamie Dimon said, “I would fire employees who trade Bitcoin.” In 2026, his peers are scrambling to sell Bitcoin to every client who walks through the bank’s doors.

Wall Street has no faith, only ledgers. When the numbers on the ledger are big enough, any faith can change.

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