Various reports have highlighted that Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo filed a report showing $96 million in bitcoin ETF holdings at the end of December 2025. Additionally, the report showed a large put (sell) option position on Strategy, the bitcoin treasury company, valued at almost $185 million at the end of December 2025. However, this is a 13F US institutional investment management report, showing that Intesa has no voting rights over these assets. In other words, these are almost certainly client holdings rather than proprietary holdings.
Hence, this is just another bank engaging in crypto on behalf of clients, although Intesa Sanpaolo is making the buy-sell decisions as it is the discretionary manager. That said, clients may have stipulated that they wanted exposure to crypto.
It’s also conceivable that the put option on Strategy may be part of structured product offerings. Wealth management arms often provide upside exposure to certain classes of assets, such as crypto, while also trying to limit the downside. In that context, a structured product could involve taking a long position in a bitcoin ETF and simultaneously a put option on Strategy, which would become profitable if the price of bitcoin dropped below a certain level.
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