Blackstone finally bets on Bitcoin — but just barely

Blackstone looks to have finally rolled the dice on Bitcoin, but it doesn't look like the investment giant is anywhere close to taking the world's largest cryptocurrency seriously.

With more than $1 trillion in assets under management, Blackstone considers itself to be the "world's largest alternative asset manager" and yet it only bought a bit more than $1 million worth of BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF, a fund worth over $60 billion, according to filing published Tuesday.

While BlackRock's Bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund, ticker symbol IBIT, is by far the market's most popular ETF that tracks the price of Bitcoin, it doesn't appear Blackstone is ready to commit significant capital to investing in digital assets. Blackstone's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission from Tuesday reflects some of investments the firm was managing up until the end of the fiscal quarter ending March 30.

According to the filing, at the end of March, Blackstone owned only $1.08 million worth of BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF. This appears to be the first time on record Blackstone has reported investing in anything crypto-related.

Back in 2019, Blackstone Group Inc. co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman admitted he wasn't much of a fan of Bitcoin. “I don’t have much interest in that because it’s hard for me to understand,” he said at the time.

Although Bitcoin has performed well in recent months, currently trading north of $100,000 and boasting a market cap over $2 trillion, some investors appear to have temporarily cooled on investing even in BlackRock's popular Bitcoin-based fund. Last week, The State of Wisconsin Investment Board revealed in a filing that no longer owned $321 million worth of BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF.

The news of the State of Wisconsin selling off its shares in IBIT came after the fund went on 20-day inflow streak that saw BlackRock's fund collect an additional $5 billion. BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETFs has been one of the most successful exchange-traded funds of all time.

In 2019, Schwarzman was also wary of cryptocurrencies potential role in aiding criminal activity. "The idea that you can transact without anybody knowing anything, you could have a lot of criminal behavior — dirty money, drug money — running all over the world. It only encourages that kind of activity,” he said at the time.