A document reveals that in the first quarter of the year, the state of Wisconsin in the United States acquired 94,562 shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).Over $100 million is the market value of the shares. Fresh inflation data that came in higher than anticipated during US morning hours caused Bitcoin to rise 1% on the news, and it is currently trading at $61,957, down 1.7% over the last 24 hours.
The first state to reveal the purchase of bitcoin is Wisconsin, which submitted its quarterly 13F filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday.Additionally, the investment board paid around $64 million for shares of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).
“Normally you don’t get these big fish institutions in the 13Fs for a year or so (when the ETF gets more liquidity) but as we’ve seen these are no ordinary launches,” Bloomberg Intelligence senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas wrote in a post on X. “Good sign, expect more, as institutions tend to move in herds.”
The Investment Board, or SWIB, was established in 1951 and, according to its website, is today in charge of managing assets valued at over $156 billion. It oversees the assets of the State Investment Fund (SIF), the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS), and additional state trust funds.
The announcement coincides with institutional investment managers that oversee at least $100 million in assets having until March 15th to report their quarterly holdings. Since the bitcoin ETFs’ introduction earlier this year, the market has been keeping an eye on these disclosures to see if any significant TradFi funds have made investments in them.