Barclays Purchases $131M of Blackrock's Bitcoin ETF

London UK-based Barclays Bank, one of the world’s largest financial institutions with more than $1.5 trillion in assets, purchased $131 million worth of Blackrock’s Ishares spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in 2024. The details were revealed in a routine regulatory filing submitted on Thursday to the SEC. The move marks a sharp shift in the bank’s perspective on bitcoin. In a 2021 article, Barclays described the top digital asset as “uninvestable” due to its volatility and advised its clients against purchasing it for their portfolios. “Its volatility makes the asset almost ‘uninvestable’ from a portfolio perspective,” the article stated. “Many would probably throw the cryptocurrency out of any portfolio in a typical mean-variance optimisation.”