Sovereign wealth funds and other patient institutional investors were “piling in” to Bitcoin throughout April even as retail flows into the US spot-Bitcoin exchange-traded funds turned negative, Coinbase head of institutional strategy John D’Agostino told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday.
Interviewed as the flagship cryptocurrency traded just shy of the $94,000 —up sharply from a mid-month drawdown near $76,000—D’Agostino said the bid behind the rebound was coming from “large institutional, long-term duration pools of capital,” led by sovereign wealth funds. “The pools of capital that have been buying during April—sovereign wealth funds, large institutional, long-term duration pools of capital—they’re looking at it basically three ways,” he explained.
Why Sovereign Wealth Funds Are Buying Bitcoin
The first driver, in D’Agostino’s account, is a macro hedge against US-dollar weakness triggered by the Trump administration’s April 2 tariff announcement. If trade frictions suppress dollar-denominated global commerce, he said, reserve allocators expect dollar demand to ebb.
“If you believe there’s going to be less global trade, then you think there’ll be lower demand for US dollars; that we refer to as de-dollarization,” he noted. Historically, many sovereign funds buy BTC in local currency and then rotate into dollars when liquidity is needed. “Well, if you think the dollar is going to weaken, then you don’t do that anymore, and so you’re holding more Bitcoin.”
The second pillar is Bitcoin’s decoupling from the post-COVID “levered tech trade” that had lumped the token in with Nasdaq high-flyers. “Bitcoin got caught up in this levered tech trade, kind of just bundled into the QQQ, bundled into Nvidia,” D’Agostino said. He argues that the rally now reflects BTC’s own fundamentals—scarcity, immutability, non-sovereign nature and portability—rather than the risk-on momentum that once tethered it to mega-cap equities. “It’s trading the way people who believe in Bitcoin would like it to trade.”
Finally, some commodity and macro desks that consider gold an inflation hedge of first resort view Bitcoin as the next-best proxy once bullion has already surged. “Maybe you missed out on that trade,” D’Agostino said of gold’s run-up. “When you do the work, there’s a very short list of assets that mirror the characteristics of gold. Bitcoin is on that short list.” Minutes earlier he had sketched the investment calculus: “As a basket for protecting against market panic and an inflation hedge, Bitcoin and gold are side by side.”
D’Agostino’s remarks highlight a striking bifurcation between on-exchange ETF flows and off-exchange institutional accumulation. From April 2 through April 22, gold ETFs absorbed roughly $8.5 billion, while spot-BTC ETFs saw net outflows of about $470 million, he said. Yet Bitcoin still advanced approximately 13% over the same window—outpacing gold’s 10.5% gain—because “institutions, sovereigns, patient pools of capital were piling in during April … and retail via the ETF were exiting.”
Pressed on whether sovereign buyers are using ETFs, D’Agostino cautioned that such funds rarely disclose their execution venues. “Hard to say—they don’t report,” he acknowledged. The ETFs themselves have only shown positive creations “the last couple of days,” leaving overall April flows negative despite the price strength.
Throughout the segment D’Agostino stressed that any perceived decorrelation between Bitcoin and risk assets remains provisional. “You’ve got to be super careful—this is a relatively short-term data set,” he warned. “I could be making a fool of myself right now, and today it could jump to a one correlation.” Even with well-understood catalysts, repeating the same macro storyline may not reproduce the same market behavior, he added, a caution that “applies to gold, that applies to any asset.”
The Coinbase executive also revisited Bitcoin’s logistical edge over physical bullion. Moving large sums of gold requires armored transport, insurance and regulatory paperwork, whereas BTC can traverse borders in minutes. “You can’t put $400 million of gold, tuck it under your arm and move if you need to,” he said. By contrast, Bitcoin allows wealth to be transferred “instantaneously, frictionless … overnight.”
At press time, BTC traded at $92,640.
