Goldman Sachs spent the first quarter sorting its crypto book into two piles - things to keep, and everything else. Bitcoin survived, while almost everything else got cut.
A 13F is the quarterly filing big funds and banks have to share with the SEC, and Goldman's latest one showed a sweeping rebalance. The bank sold off its entire $154 million stake in spot XRP ETFs - the kind that hold the coin itself rather than a bet on its price.
That money had been spread across funds run by Bitwise, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, and 21Shares before the full exit.
Solana ETFs got the same treatment, with Goldman walking away from its Solana position completely. Ethereum took a haircut too - the bank cut its spot Ethereum ETF holdings by 70%, leaving about $114 million in those funds.
The big number that didn't move: more than $700 million still sits in Bitcoin ETFs. After the Q1 rebalance, roughly seven of every eight dollars in Goldman's crypto book now sit in Bitcoin funds.
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Goldman didn't park the freed-up cash in a money-market fund. It bought 654,630 shares of Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), a stock that holds a stash of HYPE, the native token of the Hyperliquid blockchain. The position is worth about $3.33 million today, and the company sits on roughly 20 million HYPE tokens.
For Goldman, the trade is small in size but telling in shape - the bank swapped direct token risk for a stock that does the same job. That move tracks a wider Wall Street pattern of big banks picking crypto-tied stocks over the tokens themselves.
A stock is easier to defend on a balance sheet than the coin itself, and the legal and tech risks of holding a token sit with the company, not the bank.
XRP didn't crack when Goldman left. Other buyers stepped in fast, with net new money into XRP ETFs hitting $60.49 million over the past week per SoSoValue, total assets across XRP funds reaching $1.18 billion, and XRP ETFs now owning about 1.33% of the full XRP supply. XRP last traded around $1.38.
The market shrugging off a Goldman exit speaks to how deep the buyer base for XRP has grown. For investors, the read-through is clear - Wall Street is narrowing crypto into a tighter set of bets, with Bitcoin as the core, crypto-tied stocks as the next layer in, and other tokens still on the fence for big banks.
The signal isn't where Goldman's money left. It's where the money stayed.
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