Author: Xiaobing, Deep Tide TechFlow
September 12, 2017, New York, CNBC Institutional Investor Conference.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon stood on stage and threw out a sentence to the fund managers present: "Bitcoin is a fraud, worse than the tulip bubble. If anyone at JPMorgan trades Bitcoin, I will fire them immediately, for two reasons: it violates the rules, and it's stupid."
That day, Bitcoin fell 2%, to $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 an expense ratio 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 notably listed investments in Polymarket, Solana, the Ethereum development platform Tenderly, and the Bitcoin Lightning Network startup Flashnet.
Three events happened simultaneously within a week.
Wall Street's attitude towards Bitcoin took a full nine years to change 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 did not apply for a spot Bitcoin ETF this time.
It applied 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 outright, thanks to the extra income from option premiums.
Goldman Sachs' choice of this product structure precisely reveals its target client profile: not retail investors looking to 10x their money with Bitcoin, but institutional allocation funds managing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. These funds need a reason to enter Bitcoin, and that reason cannot be "faith," 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 massive $55 billion IBIT base for liquidity support, while Goldman Sachs chose not to hold Bitcoin directly, instead holding spot ETF shares indirectly through a Cayman Islands subsidiary to circumvent regulatory constraints.
Two Wall Street giants almost simultaneously locking onto the same product赛道 (sāi dào - track/field) seems to indicate one thing: The war for spot Bitcoin ETFs is over. The next war is "who can package Bitcoin into a product that 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' changing attitude towards cryptocurrency is one of the most dramatic turnarounds on Wall Street.
In 2021, Goldman Sachs restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk, beginning to offer clients Bitcoin futures and options trading. Back then, the entire industry was still using rhetoric like "we focus on blockchain technology, not Bitcoin" to express the ambiguity of "I want to touch it but dare not say so."
From late 2024 to early 2025, Goldman's 13F filings began to show its true colors. As of Q4 2024, Goldman Sachs 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 121% increase from the previous quarter.
By the Q4 2025 13F disclosure, Goldman Sachs indirectly held approximately 13,741 Bitcoin through various spot Bitcoin ETFs, worth about $1.71 billion at the time. More astonishingly, it simultaneously held about $1 billion in Ethereum ETF, $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 the Biggest Weapon
Morgan Stanley's节奏 (jiézòu - rhythm/pace) is faster and more aggressive.
MSBT listed on NYSE Arca on April 8th, becoming the first spot Bitcoin ETF directly issued by a major commercial bank in U.S. history. With an expense ratio of 0.14%, it was 11 basis points cheaper than BlackRock's IBIT, starting a price war immediately upon listing.
Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas rated MSBT's first-day performance as "top 1% of all ETF launches," predicting assets under management (AUM) 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 overseeing $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 cryptocurrencies. When a platform managing $9.3 trillion gives such allocation advice, even if only a small fraction of clients follow it, the funds flowing into the crypto market would be astronomical.
Morgan Stanley also plans to open spot trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana through E*Trade in the first half of 2026 and has already filed applications for Ethereum and Solana trusts. This isn't testing the waters; it's a full-scale rollout.
Coinbase Institutional Business Co-CEO Brett Tejpaul said it aptly: "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 launching products, embedding crypto assets into the complete chain of traditional wealth management.
The Secret in the 69-Page File: The Next Fed Chair Invested in Polymarket and Solana
But the most interesting news this week might not be Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, but Kevin Warsh's 69-page financial disclosure.
Warsh is Trump's nominee for the next Federal Reserve Chair, slated to succeed Jerome Powell, who is stepping down in May. His 69-page OGE 278e form, submitted on April 14th, contained a staggering list of investments: investment in the Ethereum L2 network Blast, investment in the decentralized prediction market Polymarket, equity in Bitcoin Lightning Network startup Flashnet, investment in Tenderly (Ethereum development platform), and prior investment in Bitwise (an asset management company running a spot Bitcoin ETF). Through DCM Investments and AVF series fund structures, Warsh has broad exposure to DeFi lending, decentralized derivatives, L1 and L2 networks, prediction markets, and Bitcoin payment infrastructure.
Although most of these positions are very small (under OGE rules, items not specifying an amount are worth less than $1,000) and Warsh has pledged to divest all upon confirmation, the symbolic significance is immense: the person poised to helm U.S. monetary policy wasn't passively buying a bit of Bitcoin in a brokerage account but was actively seeking out and investing in the most cutting-edge protocols and infrastructure in the crypto ecosystem.
Warsh had previously stated publicly that Bitcoin is "an important asset," a "good police of policy," capable of signaling when the Fed falls behind the inflation curve. Michael Saylor predicted he would become the "first pro-Bitcoin Fed Chair."
If this sentence had been uttered on that afternoon in 2017 when Jamie Dimon called "Bitcoin a fraud," it would probably have been dismissed as the ramblings of a madman.
Wall Street Has No Faith, Only Ledgers
Looking at these three events together, the picture becomes clear.
Wall Street never does anything out of "faith." It does everything for one reason only: profit. When these institutions act collectively, what they see is not the philosophical significance of Bitcoin, but 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?
Short-term, more ETFs mean fiercer fee wars. MSBT's 0.14% has already lowered the industry floor. Goldman Sachs and BlackRock's income-focused ETFs will further compete for conservative capital that "wants yield but not full volatility." Bitcoin's entry points for capital are being widened.
Medium-term, when Wall Street starts 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 that were previously scared off by "excessive volatility." Once this money comes in, it's unlikely to leave quickly.
Long-term, when the Fed Chair nominee's portfolio includes Polymarket and Solana, when the two most arrogant investment banks on Wall Street are racing to launch 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 trading Bitcoin." In 2026, his peers are falling over themselves to sell Bitcoin to every client walking through the bank's doors.
Wall Street has no faith, only ledgers. When the numbers on the ledger are large enough, any faith will change.
