Goldman Sachs to Acquire NEOS Investments in $2.25B Deal, Adding Bitcoin Income ETFs to Lineup

Goldman Sachs has agreed to acquire NEOS Investments in a transaction valued at up to $2.25 billion, a move that will add Bitcoin-related exchange-traded funds to the Wall Street bank's growing asset management portfolio. The bank announced the deal on Wednesday.

The acquisition will be structured in cash and equity, contingent on performance and service milestones. It will bring three crypto-income products — the Neos Bitcoin High Income ETF (BTCI), Boosted Bitcoin High Income ETF (XBCI), and Ethereum High Income ETF (NEHI) — under Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon described NEOS's methodology as "highly complementary" to the firm's existing buffer, managed-outcome, and income capabilities.

NEOS co-founders Garrett Paolella and Troy Cates, who are set to join Goldman Sachs Asset Management as partners following the transaction, characterized the deal as a combination of NEOS's "entrepreneurial spirit" with Goldman's institutional scale.

NEOS currently manages approximately $30 billion across 19 ETFs that employ options strategies designed to generate monthly income. When combined with Goldman Sachs Asset Management's existing $40 billion in income-oriented, options-based ETFs, the transaction will expand Goldman's active ETF business to roughly $80 billion. According to Morningstar, that would rank Goldman Sachs as the eighth-largest active ETF manager, operating within a broader $130 billion ETF platform.

The acquisition builds on Goldman Sachs' prior purchase of Innovator Capital Management, forming a three-way combination centered on derivative-income and buffer/outcome strategies. The series of acquisitions reflects a broader pattern among large asset managers consolidating specialized ETF issuers to accelerate product expansion rather than building strategies from scratch.

The Bitcoin ETFs involved in the deal do not hold the cryptocurrency directly. According to NEOS's disclosures, they instead utilize derivatives to produce income from crypto-linked exposure without owning the underlying coins. As a result, the headline yields are generated primarily through options premium sales rather than directly reflecting Bitcoin's price performance. This options-overlaid structure — sometimes called a covered-call or buy-write strategy — has proliferated across the ETF industry in recent years, with fund issuers applying it to equities, bonds, and now digital-asset benchmarks.

The deal effectively provides Goldman Sachs with an established presence in the crypto-income ETF space — an area the bank had not developed organically — at a time when institutional demand for digital-asset-adjacent, income-generating products continues to expand alongside the broader boom in derivative-income strategies. The acquisition arrives after the SEC's January 2024 approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs drew tens of billions of dollars into crypto-linked funds, prompting major financial institutions including BlackRock and Fidelity to deepen their involvement in digital-asset products.

The transaction is anticipated to close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

This article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Mathew Di Salvo.