You Won’t Believe Who Trusts Coinbase With $261 Billion in Bitcoin

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At the edge of the digital prairie sits Coinbase, quiet as a dust storm on Sunday, holding tight to 2.7 million bitcoin like a prospector with a suspiciously lumpy mattress. Bankers in ironed shirts, miners with fingernails blackened by server fans, and Silicon Valley crowd all press their fortunes into the vault, then check their pockets just in case a satoshi slipped out. 🚀

Digital Fort Knox (if Fort Knox had Wi-Fi and anxiety)

They say you can read all about it on timechainindex.com, though the charts give you fewer migraines than guessing what happens to the market on Mondays. Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN), a name uttered lovingly by investors and cursed by IRS interns, sits on 13.7% of the world’s bitcoin. It doesn’t just run a bar for traders, but moonlights as a caretaker for exchanges, miners, and enough exchange‑traded products to make your granddad’s mutual funds jealous.

In this digital keep, 1,045,246 BTC lie sleeping—customer bitcoin, apparently not spoon-fed but spread out across names like Revolut (28,536 BTC), Bitvavo (22,695 BTC), and Newton (1,480 BTC). Try counting that with an abacus—by the time you’re done, you’ll wish you’d just bought dogecoin instead.

If you listen, boots up on the porch rail, you’d hear that Blackrock leads the round-up, hitching its Ishares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) to 607,086 BTC and tipping its hat as top ETF dog. Grayscale’s GBTC, content to play second fiddle, houses 189,416 BTC, while new ETF ranchers like Ark Invest with 21shares and Bitwise wrangle enough bitcoin to keep accountants mumbling in their sleep. Altogether, that ETF/ETP corral packs in over a million BTC.

But don’t get to thinking ETFs are where the saga ends. These folks have their fingers in more pies than your grandma at a county fair. Coinbase watches over Strategy’s hoard (outshining just about any public company) and keys to the digital safes of Tesla and SpaceX—11,509 and 8,285 BTC respectively—because rocket ships run best on tweet-powered optimism and a handy bitcoin wallet.

Between its Prime Custody and OTC desks, Coinbase’s rolodex looks like an awkward family reunion—crypto-native funds, dyed-in-the-wool TradFi suits, something for everyone. The ETF league—Blackrock, Ark Invest, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale—park their treasure in Coinbase’s barn, except, of course, for Fidelity, which insists on keeping their keys at home and their cheese in the fridge, just in case.

Now, with 2,719,568 BTC tucked away like a squirrel’s last nut (£261 billion if you trust the price tickers), the digital West keeps moving. And somewhere, a Coinbase engineer sips coffee, murmurs a prayer, and checks their two-factor authentication for the hundredth time this morning. 🏦🌵

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2025-05-04 20:58