The Q1 2026 Crypto 13F: 1,997 Filers, but 93 Hedge Funds Own 44% of the Dollars
The most-cited institutional crypto dataset in market commentary is also the most consistently misread.
The Q1 2026 13F filing universe captured 1,997 unique institutional filers disclosing positions across fifteen US-listed crypto ETFs. Combined disclosed value: $20.88 billion. The filer count gets quoted constantly. The cohort distribution behind it almost never does. Hedge funds, at 93 filers, hold 44.2% of the dollars. Registered investment advisors, at 1,800 filers, hold 28.7%. The 1,116 smallest filers collectively hold less than 2% of the pool. Any analysis using the raw filer count as a proxy for institutional buyer breadth is working from the wrong denominator.
The Q1 2026 institutional crypto 13F dataset disaggregates into three operationally distinct buyer cohorts. Hedge funds dominate by dollar value but are the smallest by count. RIAs dominate by count but hold an order of magnitude less per filer. Banks hold the third-largest dollar pool primarily as authorized-participant inventory rather than directional bets. Treating these as one institutional cohort produces wrong targeting and wrong sizing.
Key takeaways
- 1,997 unique 13F filers disclosed crypto ETF positions for period ending March 31, 2026, with $20.88 billion in combined disclosed value across fifteen tracked tickers. IBIT alone represents $12.84 billion of the pool across 1,503 filers.
- The top 100 filers control 79.2% of the dollar pool. The bottom 1,116 filers control 1.84%. The holder universe is broad in count and narrow in dollars.
- Hedge funds at 93 filers hold $9.22 billion (44.2% of dollars). RIAs at 1,800 filers hold $6.00 billion (28.7%). Banks at 85 filers hold $4.48 billion (21.4%).
- 178 filers disclosed crypto ETF positions for the first time in Q1 2026, with $1.09 billion combined. Galaxy Digital filed its first 13F at $465 million. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council filed for the first time at $315.8 million.
- The rotation inside the asset class defined Q1. JPMorgan added 174% to IBIT while Millennium cut 44%. Smart money did not exit. It repositioned.
What does the Q1 2026 institutional crypto 13F actually contain?
The dataset covers 1,997 unique institutional filers disclosing positions across fifteen US-listed crypto ETFs for period ending March 31, 2026. Combined disclosed value is $20.88 billion. Of that, $19.01 billion sits in Bitcoin ETFs and $1.86 billion in Ethereum ETFs. The BTC-to-ETH dollar ratio is 10.2 to 1, despite Ethereum spot ETFs having traded for over eighteen months.
IBIT dominates the holder universe. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust accounts for $12.84 billion of disclosed value across 1,503 filers, more than 60% of the total crypto-ETF dollar pool. FBTC follows at $2.02 billion across 623 filers. GBTC retains $1.59 billion across 638 filers despite multi-quarter outflows since the 2024 ETF conversions. ETHA leads the Ethereum side at $1.44 billion across 476 filers.
The smaller Bitcoin ETFs occupy distinct niches by holder mix. ARKB at $788 million across 146 filers is heavily concentrated in fewer, larger holders. BITB at $727 million across 294 filers is broader by count. BRRR at $373 million across 15 filers is the smallest filer count in the dataset, suggesting concentrated institutional-only positioning. The Ethereum spot ETFs outside ETHA carry materially less institutional dollar weight: FETH at $234 million, ETHE at $132 million, ETHW at $46 million, ETHV at $8 million.
Two structural facts inform every analysis built off this dataset. First, institutional crypto exposure measured by 13F is overwhelmingly Bitcoin, not Ethereum. Second, the ETF concentration inside Bitcoin is itself high. IBIT represents 67.5% of disclosed BTC-ETF dollars. The next four tickers (FBTC, GBTC, ARKB, BITB) bring the cumulative top five to 94.5%. The institutional ETF holder universe is concentrated at both the product level and the holder level.
How concentrated is institutional crypto ownership?
Severely. The top ten filers control $7.71 billion or 36.9% of the disclosed dollar pool. The top twenty-five control $11.98 billion or 57.4%. The top fifty control $14.62 billion or 70%. The top one hundred control $16.54 billion or 79.2%. The narrative of broad institutional adoption is misleading at this stage. The exposure is broad in count, narrow in dollars.
The long tail is statistically present but economically minor. 1,116 filers hold less than $1 million each. Combined, they represent 1.84% of the dollar pool. 297 filers hold less than $100,000. A custodian, prime broker, or compliance vendor sized for institutional revenue cannot serve the 1,116-filer long tail economically. The addressable buyer set for institutional-grade service providers is the top one hundred to two hundred and fifty institutions, which control roughly 79% to 89% of the dollars.
| Cumulative filer rank | Disclosed dollars | % of total pool |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10 | $7.71B | 36.9% |
| Top 25 | $11.98B | 57.4% |
| Top 50 | $14.62B | 70.0% |
| Top 100 | $16.54B | 79.2% |
| Long tail (1,116 smallest) | $0.38B | 1.84% |
For analytics, market-making, and custody operators, the takeaway is structural. Filer count is the wrong KPI. Dollar concentration is the right one. Any TAM model built off the headline 1,997 number overstates the addressable buyer pool by roughly an order of magnitude.
Which cohort actually holds the dollars?
Hedge funds dominate. Categorized by filer type, the dollar distribution rearranges the narrative again. Hedge funds at $9.22 billion across 93 filers represent 44.2% of total disclosed value. The hedge fund cohort is the single largest dollar holder of crypto ETFs in the regulated US institutional universe. Average position size in this cohort is approximately $99 million, two orders of magnitude above the RIA channel.
Registered investment advisors and wealth advisors hold $6.00 billion across 1,800 filers. 28.7% of dollars, 90% of the filer count. The RIA channel is the dominant distribution layer but only the second-largest dollar pool. Average position size is roughly $3.3 million. The cohort represents the wealth-channel allocation flow that BlackRock, Fidelity, and other ETF issuers built their distribution machinery around.
Banks and broker-dealers hold $4.48 billion across 85 filers, 21.4% of the dollars. Every bank disclosed exposure is also an institution running a custody, prime, market-making, or wealth distribution capability into the same asset class. A meaningful share of these positions reflect authorized-participant inventory, market-making books, and wealth-channel ETF allocations rather than directional bets. The exposure is still real. The motivation behind it is operational.
| Cohort | Filers | Dollars | % of dollars | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hedge funds | 93 | $9.22B | 44.2% | ~$99M |
| RIAs / wealth advisors | 1,800 | $6.00B | 28.7% | ~$3.3M |
| Banks / broker-dealers | 85 | $4.48B | 21.4% | ~$52.7M |
| Sovereigns | 2 | $0.881B | 4.2% | ~$441M |
| Endowments / foundations | 7 | $0.139B | 0.7% | ~$19.9M |
| US public pensions | 2 | $0.0149B | 0.07% | ~$7.45M |
| Insurance / corporates | 6 | $0.0043B | 0.02% | ~$717K |
Sovereigns at 4.2% of dollars across just two filers are the smallest cohort by count and one of the largest by per-holder size. Combined Mubadala and Abu Dhabi Investment Council IBIT exposure exceeded $881 million at quarter end. Endowments and foundations at $139 million across seven filers include Harvard Management Company at $117 million. US public pensions hold $14.9 million across two filers, a structural absence that contradicts widespread industry narratives about pension-led institutional adoption.
One classification choice drives this ranking, and it is worth stating plainly because other reads of the same filings reach a different lead cohort. 13F-HR filings carry no standard filer-type taxonomy. Every analyst maps filer CIKs to cohorts on its own rules, and the rules move the rankings more than the arithmetic does. This breakdown counts dollars across all fifteen tracked tickers, Bitcoin and Ethereum, at the March 31 quarter-end mark, captured through May 19, and folds large multi-strategy and market-making filers (Jane Street among them) into the hedge fund cohort. Under that map, hedge funds hold the most dollars.
CoinShares, in its Q1 2026 13F analysis published June 4 (Matthew Kimmel), draws the lines differently and lands on a different leader. It measures BTC-only, splits market makers into a separate brokerage cohort, and ranks financial advisors the largest professional holder with hedge funds well behind. Both reads agree on the rotation story and sit within a methodology-explainable margin on the aggregates. They disagree on who tops the cohort table, and the disagreement is definitional, not a counting error in either source. The takeaway for a targeting operator is the definition, not the verdict. The 93-filer multi-strategy and market-making bucket is the book that moves size in custody, analytics, and execution, whatever label a given analyst pins to it. Pick the cohort map that maps to your buyer. This one maps to service-provider revenue.
Who disclosed crypto ETF positions for the first time in Q1 2026?
178 filers disclosed crypto ETF positions for the first time in Q1 2026, with no positions in any prior quarter. Combined first-time dollar value: $1.09 billion. The cohort spans crypto-native firms making first 13F appearances, sovereign sub-entities surfacing in the dataset, and traditional financial institutions adding crypto-ETF exposure as their wealth or AP operations onboard.
The two largest first-time disclosers carry quarter-defining significance. Galaxy Digital filed its first 13F at $465 million across five products: $287 million in IBIT, $116 million in ARKB, $49 million in BTCO, $13 million in ETHA, and $440,000 in GBTC. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council disclosed an 8.2 million share IBIT position worth $315.8 million, the first appearance of the Abu Dhabi sovereign sub-entity in the 13F universe. ADIC's appearance reflects internal reporting consolidation rather than a new allocation. Al Warda Investments (prior reporting structure) merged its reporting under ADIC during the quarter.
Beyond those two, the first-time discloser cohort is mostly smaller filers. Notable entries include Weiss Asset Management at $96 million, Garda Capital Partners at $28.8 million, CIBC Bancorp USA at $13.9 million, the Bank of Nova Scotia at the parent level at $8.2 million, and Citigroup at $6.6 million (classified under its main filer entity rather than its bank subsidiary).
The 558 new position rows (across 392 filers, some of whom held prior positions in other products) represent a total $1.40 billion in new disclosed dollars. The new-position dollar volume is more than 4x the cohort's median quarterly inflow. Q1 2026 was a meaningful new-allocator quarter despite the broader complex producing net outflows.
What does the rotation inside Q1 say?
Smart money rotated inside the asset class, not out of it. Quantitative and multi-strategy hedge funds cut. Strategic hedge funds, Tier 1 banks, and sovereigns added. The same 90 days produced both the largest IBIT cuts and the largest IBIT adds of any quarter since the spot ETFs launched.
The largest cuts came from quantitative hedge funds. Millennium Management cut its IBIT position 43.8% from 34.3 million shares to 19.3 million shares, a reduction worth approximately $576 million at quarter-end prices. Millennium also cut ARKB, BITB, FBTC, FETH, and ETHA by similar percentages, the largest coordinated reduction across products of any single filer. Jane Street cut IBIT 71.1% from 20.3 million shares to 5.9 million. Schonfeld cut IBIT from 8.1 million shares to 2.4 million while increasing ARKB, BITB, and FBTC.
The largest adds came from strategic hedge funds and named TradFi institutions. JPMorgan Chase increased its IBIT position 174.2% from 3.0 million shares to 8.3 million shares, worth $313 million. Morgan Stanley grew its aggregate crypto ETF book to $791 million across ten products. Mubadala added 15.9% to its IBIT position, ending at 14.7 million shares worth $565.6 million in its sixth consecutive quarter of accumulation.
| Filer | Position | Q1 change | End-Q1 value |
|---|---|---|---|
| JPMorgan Chase | IBIT | +174% (3.0M to 8.3M shares) | $313M |
| Mubadala | IBIT | +15.9% | $566M |
| Abu Dhabi Investment Council | IBIT | New filer | $316M |
| Morgan Stanley | IBIT | Increased | $663M |
| Millennium Management | IBIT | -43.8% (34.3M to 19.3M shares) | $741M |
| Jane Street | IBIT | -71.1% (20.3M to 5.9M shares) | $226M |
| Schonfeld Strategic | IBIT | -71.0% | $90M |
| Goldman Sachs | IBIT | -13.1% (20.7M to 18.0M shares) | $691M |
| Harvard Management | IBIT | -43% | $117M |
The Bitcoin-Ethereum overlap pattern reinforces the read. Of 1,997 filers, 1,315 hold only BTC products. 47 hold only ETH products. 635 (31.8%) hold both. ETH-only filers are rare. The dominant pattern is BTC-first with optional ETH overlay rather than parallel asset allocation. For Ethereum-focused analytics and BD, the dataset reads as a roughly 32% conversion funnel from BTC exposure to ETH exposure rather than a separate buyer base.
What this means for analytics, market making, custody, and BD targeting
Anyone running a target list, a TAM model, or research off this dataset should disaggregate before sizing. Treating the 1,997 filer count as a proxy for institutional buyer breadth produces an addressable-market estimate roughly 10x larger than the actually serviceable pool. The right framing inverts the headline. The institutional crypto holder universe is concentrated at the dollar level despite broad filer count. Operators selling institutional-grade infrastructure should target the top 100 to 250 holders.
For analytics and data providers, the cohort breakdown reorders sales priority. Hedge funds at 93 filers but 44.2% of dollars are the operational center of gravity. Average position size near $99 million justifies enterprise pricing and dedicated coverage. The 1,800-filer RIA channel is wide and cheap to reach but does not carry the dollar weight to justify enterprise motion. It is a self-serve and channel-partner play. Banks at 85 filers are the highest-value enterprise targets because every bank disclosed position is also a custody, prime, MM, or wealth distribution capability. The 13F line is a leading indicator of a multi-product procurement cycle.
For market makers and OTC desks, the rotation pattern is the actionable read. Same asset, same quarter, opposite postures. The strategic hedge fund cohort (Brevan Howard, Horizon Kinetics, Avenir Tech) accumulated. The quantitative cohort (Millennium, Jane Street, Schonfeld) cut. The behavioral split tells you which counterparties were rebalancing and which were de-risking. Infrastructure demand around custody, settlement, and rebalancing remained active throughout the drawdown.
For custodians, the bank cohort is the highest-value target. JPMorgan added 174% to IBIT in Q1. Morgan Stanley grew to $791 million across ten products. Citigroup, CIBC Bancorp USA, and the Bank of Nova Scotia appeared as first-time filers. Wells Fargo disclosed $326 million across eleven products. The 85-filer bank cohort represents the wealth-channel, AP-inventory, and direct-allocation flows that custodians serve, and the cohort is institutional-grade across the board.
For any operator running outbound off institutional adoption framing, the most actionable single correction is to swap the filer count for the dollar concentration breakdown. Cite the top 100 holders control 79.2% of the dollar pool, not 1,997 institutions disclosed crypto exposure. The first sentence sells against a defined target list. The second sells against a fiction.
What this means
The Q1 2026 institutional crypto 13F is the most comprehensive public dataset on US-regulated institutional crypto exposure and the most consistently misread. The misreading produces TAM models that overstate the addressable buyer pool by an order of magnitude, sales motions that chase the wrong cohort, and research that reproduces the broad institutional adoption narrative without supporting it from primary data. The corrective is structural, not editorial: disaggregate before sizing. Use the dollar concentration breakdown as the addressable-market sizing tool. Use the cohort breakdown as the targeting tool. Use the rotation pattern as the timing tool. Operators that internalize this in Q2 will outpace the ones still selling to the 1,997 number.
Read the full report
The Institutional Crypto Map · Q1 2026.
Every named entity, with its date and primary source. The OCC trust-bank wave, the stablecoin issuer landscape, the TradFi-as-issuer flip, the European MiCA acceleration, and the Asian institutional consolidation pattern.
Common questions
How many institutional filers disclosed crypto ETF positions in Q1 2026?
1,997 unique 13F filers disclosed positions across fifteen US-listed crypto ETFs for period ending March 31, 2026. Combined disclosed value: $20.88 billion. IBIT accounts for $12.84 billion across 1,503 filers, more than 60% of the total pool. The remaining $8.04 billion is distributed across the other fourteen tracked tickers.
How concentrated is institutional crypto ownership at the dollar level?
The top ten filers control $7.71 billion or 36.9% of the disclosed pool. The top fifty control 70%. The top one hundred control 79.2%. The bottom 1,116 filers collectively hold 1.84% of dollars. The holder universe is broad in count and severely narrow in dollars. Institutional-grade service providers should size addressable market off the top 100 to 250 holders.
Which cohort holds the largest share of institutional crypto exposure?
Hedge funds. 93 filers hold $9.22 billion, or 44.2% of the total disclosed dollar pool. Average position size is approximately $99 million. RIAs and wealth advisors are second at $6.00 billion across 1,800 filers (28.7% of dollars, 90% of the filer count). Banks and broker-dealers are third at $4.48 billion across 85 filers (21.4% of dollars).
Did US public pensions buy crypto ETFs in Q1 2026?
No major US public pension announced a new direct crypto allocation in Q1 2026 with verifiable primary sourcing. The 13F dataset confirms minimal direct pension exposure. Only the State of Michigan Retirement System and one small Sentinel Pension Advisors entity appear, with combined exposure under $15 million. The widely-circulated CalPERS $500 million bitcoin allocation figure is unsupported by any 13F line, board action, or press release.
How did smart money behave through the Q1 2026 Bitcoin drawdown?
It rotated inside the asset class, not out. JPMorgan added 174% to IBIT, ending at $313 million. Mubadala added 15.9% to $566 million in its sixth consecutive quarter of accumulation. Millennium cut IBIT 44%. Jane Street cut 71%. The same 90 days produced both the largest cuts and the largest adds in the dataset.
Sources
- SEC EDGAR 13F-HR filings for period ending March 31, 2026 (1,997 unique filers, $20.88 billion disclosed across fifteen tracked tickers). Captured through May 19, 2026.
- The Institutional Crypto Map · Q1 2026. Meridial, May 2026. meridial.io
- FinTech Weekly Q1 2026 BlackRock earnings coverage (IBIT inflow data).
- iShares Ethereum Trust Form 10-Q (ETHA Q1 2026 disclosure).
- CoinTelegraph citing CoinGlass for US spot Bitcoin ETF Q1 2026 net flow data.
- StatMuse Money for Q4 2025 BTC closing price. Fortune and CoinDesk for Q1 2026 closing price.
- CoinShares Q1 2026 13F analysis, Matthew Kimmel, June 4, 2026.