Italy’s Largest Bank Dumps BTC for ETH ETF

In Bitcoin ETF news today, Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank, filed its Q2 2026 Form 13F, the SEC’s mandatory quarterly disclosure of institutional long positions in US-listed securities, on August 4, and the numbers tell a sharp story.

The bank slashed its BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) position by roughly 94% while tripling its stake in BlackRock’s staked Ethereum product, even as both assets fell hard during the quarter.

Italy’s Largest Bank Intesa Sanpaolo Cuts IBIT Stake 94%, Triples Staked Ethereum ETF Holdings

Italy’s largest banking group, Intesa Sanpaolo, reported in its latest Form 13F that, as of June 30, its common-share position in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) fell 93.7%… pic.twitter.com/A5YjlWyym9

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 4, 2026

This news dropped as Bitcoin sits at around $64,000, up +0.7% over the past 24 hours, while Ethereum trades for roughly $1,850, up just +0.3% in the same timeframe.

The broader crypto market is up +1.7% since yesterday, with the total market cap sitting at $2.27 trillion and daily trading volume sitting at over $53Bn, up from $48Bn the day before.

Bitcoin ETF News: The IBIT Exit That Wasn’t a Full Bitcoin Retreat

(SOURCE: CoinGlass)

Intesa reduced its IBIT, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, the largest spot Bitcoin ETF by assets, from 646,809 shares to just 40,723, leaving a position worth $1.36M as of June 30, according to the SEC filing.

The bank also eliminated 99% of its IBIT call options and replaced them with a new put position covering 500,000 shares – a contract that profits if IBIT’s price falls further.

That said, this is not a clean break from Bitcoin. Intesa held onto 3.47 million shares of the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB), worth $67.6M, the single largest crypto-linked position in the entire filing, down only about 4% from the prior quarter.

The bank also left its Grayscale XRP Trust position unchanged at 712,319 shares. The pattern is selective reduction, not a wholesale exit from institutional crypto exposure.

Staked Ethereum Gets the Upgrade

While Bitcoin exposure was being trimmed, Intesa moved in the opposite direction on Ethereum. The bank tripled its position in BlackRock’s iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF, an Ethereum ETF product that holds ETH and passes through network staking rewards.

These rewards typically run around 3–4% annually, growing from 116,200 shares worth $3.15M at the end of March to 349,600 shares worth $7.1M by June 30, according to the primary source filing.

ETH fell 25% over Q2 2026, meaning Intesa was buying into weakness rather than chasing a rally. The structural appeal of staked Ethereum, yield that spot Bitcoin funds structurally cannot offer, appears to be the driver.

Morgan Stanley has moved in a similar direction, launching staked Ethereum ETPs for institutional clients, suggesting the preference for yield-bearing ETH products is becoming a broader institutional pattern rather than a single bank’s idiosyncratic call.

(SOURCE: Yahoo Finance)

Market Context: ETF Rotation in a Rough Quarter

In other Bitcoin ETF news, Intesa’s moves landed in a bruising market environment. Bitcoin dropped 14% over Q2 2026, its third consecutive quarter of losses, while net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs reached approximately $4.89Bn across the quarter, per CoinGlass data.

The iShares Bitcoin Trust alone shed $2.95Bn in that period. Spot Ethereum ETF products recorded more than $715M in outflows over the same window.

The broader filing also showed Intesa nearly doubling its BitGo Holdings stake to 323,000 shares while cutting Coinbase by 32%, Circle by 10%, and Robinhood by 43%, a pullback from crypto infrastructure equities even as it added on the ETF side.

The largest single disclosed position had nothing to do with crypto directly: a new 5.66 million-share stake in SpaceX valued at $966.42M, though SpaceX holds 18,712 BTC on its balance sheet, giving the position indirect Bitcoin exposure.

CEO Carlo Messina described the bank’s first direct Bitcoin purchase, 11 BTC for approximately 1 million euros in January 2025, as an experiment at the time.

The Q2 2026 filing shows the experiment has evolved into active portfolio management: hedged, yield-seeking, and clearly willing to rotate between products as conditions shift. The next quarterly filing, due by August 14, will reveal whether other institutions followed the same ETF rotation playbook during Q2.

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