Bitwise Says Sovereign Wealth Funds Sold Gold to Buy Bitcoin (BTC) in Report Covering 15 Institutions

Fifteen Institutions, Zero Sellers

Sovereign wealth funds share top billing with pensions, endowments and foundations in Bitwise's first institutional crypto adoption report, and the firm's head of research, Ryan Rasmussen, says some of these state-backed pools are selling gold to buy Bitcoin alongside gold as a core hedge. The report draws on interviews Bitwise conducted with 15 major institutions across the four allocator groups, and its central finding is stark: not one of them sold during the slide from $125,000 to $60,000, and several used the drawdown to add to their positions. Peak to trough, that is a decline of roughly 52%, yet the allocators treated it as accumulation territory rather than an exit signal. For a market that spent the past year questioning whether institutional crypto adoption was durable, a full cohort of 15 institutions choosing to HODL through that drawdown is the report's most quotable figure.

Rasmussen frames the posture through a debasement argument: institutions hold Bitcoin next to gold rather than choosing between the two, because both assets are read as protection against the erosion of fiat purchasing power. In his telling, the sovereign funds selling gold are running the same logic at larger scale, swapping one debasement hedge for another they judge to carry more upside. Pensions, endowments and foundations differ in mandate and liquidity needs, but the interviews describe a shared posture of long horizons and deliberately small sizing relative to total portfolios. The reserve-asset framing overlaps with the strategic Bitcoin reserve debate that has moved from theory into government policy, giving the sovereign cohort a template to study rather than an experiment to run. The chose to HODL conviction is now being tested against a live tape, with the Bitcoin price trading near $84,500 on Wednesday, well above the $60,000 floor the report identifies as the cycle bottom but far below the $125,000 high those holders sat through without selling.

$2.5B Weekly ETF Inflows

Underneath the institutional story sits the exchange-traded plumbing Rasmussen credits with changing market structure. Weekly spot Bitcoin ETF inflows reached $2.5 billion during the period the report covers, and he argues these products made the recent bear market structurally shallower than prior cycles, because demand arriving through regulated wrappers met the selling that defined earlier drawdowns with steady two-way liquidity. Our own tracking shows spot ETFs have since extended a nine-day inflow streak past $3.1 billion, a pace consistent with the report's thesis rather than an isolated week. Allocation guidance inside traditional finance supplies the sizing context: Rasmussen cites Wells Fargo weighing a 2% to 3% Bitcoin allocation, while research from Fidelity and BlackRock spans a wider 2% to 8% band. The precise ranges matter less than their existence, since when two of the largest asset managers and a systemically important bank model single-digit Bitcoin sleeves for clients, the institutional question shifts from whether to allocate to how much.

Rasmussen also stakes a cycle claim: Bitwise believes the bottom was $60,000. The call rests on the same interview base, because allocators who declined to sell at that level effectively capped the downside, and it is falsifiable in public view. He adds a correlation argument, contending Bitcoin has not traded in line with bonds, gold or stocks, which is the behavior a debasement hedge is supposed to show. Macro reinforced the case this week, as the price briefly topped $85,600 after the cooler-than-expected US Core PCE print before easing back, and it had earlier held its $83K floor after a dip to $82,850. Skeptics can fairly note that Bitwise sells crypto products of its own; the allocation figures, however, trace to named institutions and published research, and the $2.5 billion weekly flow number stands independently on ETF records.

$87,400 Ceiling, $82,100 Floor

COINOTAG's proprietary 42-indicator composite S/R scoring engine rates the $87,395.67 resistance at 76/100, driven by the confluence of the Fibo 0.000 projection, Donchian Upper band and Swing High, with the $85,455.91 shelf scoring 54/100 from Keltner Upper and HVN. Below, support at $82,139.07 carries a 67/100 composite on S2, ATR Lower and EMA 20 confluence, making a daily close beneath it the invalidator for the bullish read. RSI prints 63.52 with a bearish MACD inside an uptrend, funding sits at 0.0051%, open interest at $15.41 billion and the long/short account ratio at 1.26 (55.7% long), while Fear & Greed reads 71, Greed. Among the cohorts Bitwise maps, sovereign wealth funds hold the most consequential seat: they are the ones selling gold to fund their Bitcoin accumulation.