The Bank of Montreal (BMO) has just come clean on its substantial exposure to the Bitcoin ETF market through a 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. As one of the “Big Five” in Canada, BMO’s investments in leading ETFs like Fidelity’s FBTC, Frankin Templeton’s AZBC, BlackRock’s IBIT, and Grayscale’s GBTC denote the world’s biggest lenders and asset managers moving to mainstream Bitcoin. The news comes following the SEC decision made in January 2024 to open the doors toward the long-awaited Spot Bitcoin ETFs and signals that a surge of important financial institutions could engage with digital assets.

As the financial investment landscape continues to change, BMO’s move underlines the fact that the place of cryptocurrencies in mainstream finance keeps growing. This will likely be a positive turning point towards further adoption and integration of the system into the sector: it could allow investors to take part in the crypto market without actually owning means for direct investment. More so, all the other key banks, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, and even Swiss UBS, have their stakes in Bitcoin ETFs, which might change the norms of investment across the globe.

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