Goldman Sachs Is Buying The Firm Behind Bitcoin's Big Income ETFs

Goldman Sachs agreed on 12 August to buy NEOS Investments, paying up to $2.25bn in cash and equity with part of it tied to performance and service commitments. NEOS ran $30bn across 19 exchange-traded funds at the end of June, all of them built on the same idea: hold an asset, sell options against it, and pay the premium out monthly. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

Three of those 19 funds are the reason this is a crypto story. NEOS runs the largest options-income funds attached to Bitcoin and Ethereum, and they are now on their way into the balance sheet of a bank that had no crypto fund range at all.

The three crypto funds

The distribution rates are NEOS’s own, stated as at 31 July 2026, and they move with option premiums rather than being promised. BTCI is much the largest of the three: it held $1,099,671,214 on 14 August, charges 0.99 per cent, and has been running since 16 October 2024.

Do these funds hold bitcoin?

No, and the distinction is worth getting right before the deal is read as Goldman buying a bitcoin business. BTCI’s own documentation says it takes exposure through exchange-traded products that hold bitcoin directly, then runs a data-driven call option strategy on bitcoin futures funds. Its largest positions are shares in spot bitcoin ETPs, including BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and VanEck’s fund, sitting alongside the options contracts. NEHI is built the same way against ether.

So the chain runs: bitcoin, then a spot bitcoin ETF holding it, then a NEOS fund holding that ETF and writing calls on a related futures product, then an investor collecting a monthly payment. Goldman is buying the fourth link, which is a fee business on volatility, not a directional position.

That structure also explains the headline yields. A distribution rate near 27 per cent is not interest and it is not a dividend. It is mostly option premium harvested from an asset whose volatility is the point, paid out monthly, and NEOS states in its own fund documentation that distributions have at times been classified as a return of capital. A fund that sells upside for income keeps the downside and caps the recovery.

The second ETF firm Goldman has bought this year

This is not a one-off purchase. Goldman closed its acquisition of Innovator Capital Management on 2 April, paying about $2.0bn for a defined-outcome specialist with roughly $31bn across 171 ETFs. Its own announcement of the NEOS deal sets out where the two leave it: NEOS adds $30bn of active income ETFs to $40bn of income and outcome-oriented options-based products, and the combined platform makes Goldman Sachs Asset Management a top-eight active ETF provider with $80bn in active ETFs inside a $130bn global ETF platform, measured at 30 June 2026.

Two firms, roughly $4.25bn, and about $61bn of assets inside five months. Both targets sell the same kind of product to the same kind of buyer: a packaged outcome for financial advisers, defined in advance, whether that is a buffer against losses or a monthly payment. Neither is an index business, and both carry fees an index business cannot.

The crypto funds arrive as part of that logic rather than as a bet on the asset. Goldman’s chairman and chief executive David Solomon framed the purchase around NEOS’s product design and its investor education work, and the firm’s co-founders Garrett Paolella and Troy Cates are joining with the business. What lands on Goldman’s platform in the first quarter of 2027, if regulators agree, is a well-established way for an adviser to give a client crypto-linked income without the client ever holding a coin.