A fund that doesn't directly hold any crypto is, through its equity stakes, indirectly sitting on a record-breaking amount of Bitcoin exposure.
According to data disclosed by research firm K33, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages Norway's sovereign wealth fund, has seen its indirect Bitcoin exposure climb to a record high. This exposure doesn't come from buying BTC directly, but from its holdings in publicly listed companies that own Bitcoin—with a single company, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), accounting for 86% of it.
Strategy has spent years raising capital through debt issuance and share offerings to buy Bitcoin, making it the core of the company's balance sheet strategy. NBIM's indirect Bitcoin exposure is, in essence, a reflection of the scale of its stake in this one company's stock.
K33 also noted that NBIM has newly disclosed an $88 million investment in Bitmine. Bitmine is an Ethereum treasury company that operates on a similar logic to Strategy, raising funds through public markets to buy and hold ETH. This means NBIM's indirect crypto exposure has now expanded beyond Bitcoin alone to include Ethereum treasury companies as well.
NBIM itself doesn't hold any crypto directly—all of this exposure comes purely from its equity investments in related publicly listed companies. Neither K33 nor publicly available data offer a more complete breakdown of the exact exposure amount or its share of the fund's total assets.
