Banking Giant UBS Ventures Into Crypto With Spot Bitcoin ETF Investment

A recent regulatory filing from UBS reveals that the Swiss banking titan holds a considerable amount of shares in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) exchange-traded fund (ETF). This makes UBS the latest institution to get on board with crypto-based investment vehicles.

UBS Reports Holding Shares In BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF

The Zürich-based banking giant UBS has entered the crypto arena with Bitcoin (BTC) ETF investments.

Paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows that the banking behemoth holds 3,600 shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust. This investment underscores the soaring interest of traditional financial institutions in the nascent cryptocurrency space, particularly in the flagship cryptocurrency.

IBIT, managed by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, gives ordinary investors a seamless way to gain exposure to BTC without the intricacies associated with directly buying and holding the crypto.

In January, UBS allowed some clients who desired to trade Bitcoin ETFs to do so. However, accounts with a lower degree of risk tolerance are blocked from buying the new products. Furthermore, UBS does not solicit the Bitcoin ETF trades. 

As ZyCrypto reported in April, BlackRock named five additional authorized participants (APs) for the IBIT, including UBS, as the fund continued to attract billions of dollars from investors.

The move marks somewhat of a U-turn for UBS, given that ex-CEO Ralph Hamers blasted cryptocurrencies as “speculation” back in 2021, asserting that they cannot be viewed as a legitimate investment.

Major Banks Embrace Crypto

Notably, major banks are suddenly jumping on the BTC ETF bandwagon. American banking giant Wells Fargo, for instance, recently disclosed investments in several spot Bitcoin ETFs, including Grayscale’s GBTC and ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF. The largest bank in the United States with $2.6 trillion in assets, JPMorgan, also reported holding shares of ETFs offered by Grayscale, ProShares, Bitwise, BlackRock, and Fidelity.

Meanwhile, some other banks in the U.S. remain skeptical about Bitcoin despite the momentous ETF approval in January.

“We do not think it is an investment asset class,” Goldman Sachs’ chief investment officer and well-known Bitcoin hater Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani told the Wall Street Journal on April 2. “We’re not believers in crypto,” she opined.