NewsCryptoBNY Mellon Lifts Strive (ASST) Stake 28% to $7 Million as Monday's 13F Deadline Nears

BNY Mellon Lifts Strive (ASST) Stake 28% to $7 Million as Monday's 13F Deadline Nears

Author: Bitcoin Magazine·

Key Takeaways

  • •BNY Mellon's Strive stake rose 28% in the third quarter to 237,100 shares worth $6.97 million at Sept. 30, up from 185,556 shares valued at about $2.02 million at June 30.
  • •The dollar value of the position more than tripled mainly because ASST's implied share price climbed from $10.91 to $29.41, figures derived from reported market values rather than purchase prices.
  • •A 13F aggregates client, managed and discretionary holdings across a filer's group, so the disclosed position is not proof that a bank committed its own capital to bitcoin or a bitcoin treasury stock.
  • •BNY's filing also showed 1,056,230 Strategy shares worth $161.7 million and 162,072 IBIT shares worth $7.67 million, with the IBIT position nearly doubling from the prior quarter.
  • •Barclays and Citigroup reported larger bitcoin ETF holdings, while Wells Fargo, Millennium Management and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors had not appeared on EDGAR as of Thursday morning ahead of the Nov. 16 deadline.
BNY Mellon Lifts Strive (ASST) Stake 28% to $7 Million as Monday's 13F Deadline Nears

Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) increased its stake in Strive (ASST) by 28% during the third quarter, a Form 13F filed Nov. 5 shows, lifting the position to 237,100 shares worth $6.97 million at Sept. 30 prices.

That total is up 51,544 shares from the 185,556 BNY reported at June 30, when the same holding was valued at about $2.02 million, the prior quarter's filing shows. Nearly all of the dollar jump is the stock itself: ASST's implied price across the two filings rose from $10.91 at June 30 to $29.41 at Sept. 30 — figures derived by dividing each quarter's reported value by the share count, since 13Fs disclose market value rather than purchase prices — so the disclosed stake more than tripled in value even though the share count rose 28%.

A 13F is a snapshot, not a trading diary. BNY filed a combination report that folds in holdings across its group, so the Strive line can include client, fund and discretionary positions rather than a single proprietary bet, and the firm may have changed the holding since Sept. 30. The bank oversees $63.4 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $2.2 trillion in assets under management, both as of Sept. 30.

The Strive position is still modest next to other bitcoin-linked lines on the same report. BNY held 1,056,230 shares of Strategy (MSTR) worth $161.7 million and 162,072 shares of BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) worth $7.67 million — an IBIT stake that nearly doubled from 85,282 shares at June 30 and is now about the same size as the Strive line.

Monday's Deadline Still Has a Few Large Filers Outstanding

Institutional managers that exercise investment discretion over $100 million or more in 13F securities have 45 days after quarter-end to disclose those holdings. That window ran to Nov. 14, a Saturday, so the deadline is Monday, Nov. 16.

JPMorgan Chase filed its third-quarter 13F on Thursday. Wells Fargo, Millennium Management and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors had not appeared on the SEC's EDGAR system, the agency's public database of company filings, as of Thursday morning. Those remaining names are among the larger managers whose bitcoin ETF and treasury-stock lines, if they report any, are not yet on the public record.

BNY was earlier than most. It filed on Nov. 5, more than a week before the deadline, which is why the Strive line is already public while a handful of large managers are still unaccounted for.

Other Banks Have Already Disclosed Bitcoin ETF Positions

Barclays, in a 13F filed Nov. 6, reported 3,942,900 IBIT shares worth $186.7 million at Sept. 30, up 48% from 2,658,147 shares three months earlier. Citigroup, in a filing dated Nov. 4, reported 521,144 IBIT shares worth $24.7 million, up from 347,114 at June 30, and a new $118.9 million position in Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) — 1,636,387 shares — that did not appear on its June 30 filing.

Those lines carry the same caveat as BNY's Strive stake: a 13F gathers client, managed and trading-book positions, not proof that a bank put its own capital into bitcoin or into a bitcoin treasury stock.

Strive itself has kept buying the underlying asset. The company held 43,153 bitcoin after adding 29 coins in the week through Nov. 6, a recent 8-K showed, making it one of the larger public bitcoin treasury names after Strategy — a category of publicly traded companies that hold bitcoin on their corporate balance sheets — and a reason banks and asset managers now show up in its 13F lines. Europe's largest asset manager, Amundi, also raised its Strategy stake 44% in the same quarter, a reminder that traditional managers kept adding bitcoin proxies even as the spot market cooled into the fall.

Monday's remaining filings will show whether other large managers added or cut bitcoin treasury names after a quarter in which ASST ran hard. For now, BNY's Nov. 5 filing is the record it left: 237,100 Strive shares, up 28%, marked at $6.97 million.

This article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.