Institutions Ride Out Crypto Market Turbulence
Bitwise Asset Management released its first Institutional Crypto Adoption Report, which found that no institution among the 15 interviewed reduced its crypto allocation during a roughly 50% market drawdown between Q4 2025 and Q2 2026. In fact, several institutions added to their positions.
The report's authors, Matt Hougan and Ryan Rasmussen, drew on interviews with endowments, foundations, public pensions, sovereign wealth funds, multi-family offices, investment consultants, and public companies managing hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dollars. Every institution that holds crypto holds Bitcoin, with nearly all of them holding it as their first, largest, and longest-held position.
Allocators that weight their holdings by market capitalization keep around 80% of their crypto exposure in Bitcoin. Most now frame the asset alongside gold as a store of value. One large endowment told Bitwise that people are starting to use Bitcoin as a fiat debasement trade along with gold, while one sovereign wealth fund said it was funding its crypto allocation by selling foreign exchange and gold reserves.
Ether and Solana are held in smaller positions with shorter time horizons and explicit exit conditions. One institution with DeFi experience expressed skepticism about the value-accruing mechanism of these tokens, and several investors stated that they would exit within a few years if adoption fails to show up in prices.