Banque de France mapped crypto ETFs’ institutional risk links

Banque de France researchers said on December 19, 2025 that the growth of U.S. spot crypto exchange-traded funds had drawn banks, asset managers and hedge funds deeper into digital-asset markets, creating potential channels between crypto volatility and traditional finance.

The publication did not announce a rule or document a crisis. It assembled Bloomberg asset data, Securities and Exchange Commission Form 13F filings and Commodity Futures Trading Commission positioning data to describe an institutional market structure that had developed since U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs began trading in January 2024. Its central warning was about interconnection: regulated wrappers had made crypto exposure easier to hold, trade and intermediate inside familiar financial institutions.

What the researchers measured

Using Bloomberg data through November 26, 2025, the authors put assets under management for the main spot bitcoin ETFs at almost $115 billion and for spot ether ETFs at almost $17 billion. Those are product-asset totals, not daily net inflows, trading volume or the amount institutions alone owned.

For ownership, the researchers used Form 13F filings, which cover institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in reportable securities. They estimated that nearly 2,000 institutional investors held U.S. bitcoin ETFs during 2024. The reported institutional position rose from about $13 billion at the end of the first quarter to more than $33 billion at year-end, when the authors estimated institutions represented approximately 30% of the market.

The paper attributed nearly $18 billion of year-end holdings to hedge funds and nearly $7 billion to asset managers and other firms. Certain U.S. global systemically important banks reported more than $2.7 billion in crypto-ETF investments at the end of 2024, according to the authors, reflecting both broker-dealer market intermediation and asset-management activity.

These figures are reported results from the Banque de France analysis, not Coinburn calculations. The SEC publishes 13F data as filed and without changing filers’ submissions; the dataset does not independently validate each filing.

A short position was not necessarily a bearish call

The CFTC series added a second layer. In data displayed from January 2024 through roughly October 2025, asset managers and other institutional investors were net long CME bitcoin futures, while leveraged funds were net short. The authors interpreted much of the hedge-fund short position as basis trading: funds could own bitcoin ETF shares while selling futures, seeking to capture convergence between futures and spot-linked prices.

That distinction matters because a futures short cannot be read in isolation as a forecast that bitcoin will fall. The combined ETF and futures legs may instead form a hedged relative-value trade. The official CFTC categories are broad, however, and aggregated positioning does not reveal every manager’s motive, financing terms or risk controls.

Where the stability concern sat

The publication identified three possible pressure points. First, bank-affiliated broker-dealers commonly act as authorized participants that create and redeem ETF shares. Second, the authors estimated that Coinbase custodied 80% of the crypto assets underlying the main ETFs, concentrating an operational role in one provider. Third, crypto trades continuously while U.S.-listed ETF shares have exchange hours, leaving a timing mismatch when the underlying market moves while the stock market is closed.

Those observations establish exposure and concentration, not proof of imminent systemic harm. Form 13F reports are quarterly and can combine proprietary positions with assets held for clients; they do not identify the ultimate beneficial owner in every case. The paper’s retail share is therefore an estimate rather than a direct census. Its custody percentage also applies to the authors’ set of “main” ETFs, not every crypto investment product.

The verified development on December 19, 2025 was an official central-bank research warning that crypto ETFs had expanded institutional participation and potential contagion channels. The evidence supported closer monitoring. It did not show that losses had already crossed from crypto ETFs into the banking system.