Norway's NBIM Sees Record Indirect Bitcoin Exposure via Strategy

Norway's sovereign wealth fund has reached a record level of indirect bitcoin exposure, according to research firm K33. The largest share of that exposure, 86%, comes from its stake in Strategy, Michael Saylor's company with a massive Bitcoin reserve. The fund also disclosed a new $88 million position in Bitmine, an Ethereum treasury company.

What the K33 research found

Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, managed by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), does not buy cryptocurrency directly. Instead, the fund holds a diversified portfolio of global public equities, and some of those companies, Strategy among them, hold substantial Bitcoin reserves on their balance sheets. Because of the sheer size of NBIM's Strategy stake, that single position drives the bulk of the fund's indirect bitcoin exposure, K33 found. According to the firm, Strategy's share of that total indirect exposure climbed to 86%, the highest figure on record.

The strategy of holding bitcoin on a public company's balance sheet gained traction after Michael Saylor launched the approach at Strategy back in 2020. Dozens of public companies have since copied the model on a smaller scale, but Strategy remains the largest corporate bitcoin holder in the world, making it the primary source of indirect exposure for any large index-tracking investor. NBIM traditionally owns roughly 1.5% of all publicly listed shares worldwide, so the fund ends up holding a stake in nearly every large blue-chip company almost automatically, including those listed on Nasdaq and NYSE, where Strategy trades.

How indirect exposure actually works

NBIM manages more than $1.9 trillion in assets and builds its portfolio by broadly tracking global equity indices. That means the fund automatically ends up holding a stake in any large public company, including ones whose business model centers on a crypto reserve. When bitcoin's price rises, Strategy's market capitalization rises too, and the value of NBIM's stake climbs along with it. That mechanism differs meaningfully from owning the coin directly. An investor gains exposure to the underlying asset but also takes on risks specific to the company's stock, such as debt load or a market cap premium sitting above the value of its coin reserve.

K33 builds its estimates from NBIM's own annual portfolio disclosures, which the fund publishes openly. Because the Norwegian fund is state-owned and accountable to parliament, its disclosure of individual company positions is far more detailed than what a typical private institutional investor releases, which lets researchers track Strategy's share year over year with precision.

A new bet on Bitmine

Beyond its Strategy stake, NBIM disclosed a new $88 million investment in Bitmine Immersion Technologies, a company that shifted to accumulating Ethereum on its balance sheet following Strategy's playbook. Bitmine is chaired by investor Tom Lee, and the company became one of the largest corporate holders of ETH in a short span of time.

• Bitmine follows the same model as Strategy, but for ether instead of bitcoin.
• The $88 million NBIM position is new and had not previously appeared in the fund's disclosures.
• Combined with the Strategy stake, it shows the fund gaining exposure to two of the largest crypto assets at once through public company shares.

Bitmine adopted Strategy's ether playbook in early 2025 and has steadily built up its coin reserve since, becoming one of the largest corporate ETH treasuries in the world. NBIM's $88 million position is small next to its multibillion-dollar Strategy stake, but Bitmine's appearance in the Norwegian fund's portfolio shows how an index-tracking strategy automatically picks up new companies in this category once they go public or cross a market cap threshold. Over the past year, the corporate crypto treasury model has spread to other coins as well, so the list of companies that large index funds can pick up automatically keeps growing.

How the market is reading it

Analysts who track corporate crypto reserves say the growing Strategy share in NBIM's portfolio reflects a broader trend. Sovereign funds and pension systems are increasingly gaining exposure to bitcoin and ether not directly, but through shares of public companies that hold crypto reserves on their balance sheets. For NBIM, this remains a side effect of its standard index strategy rather than a deliberate crypto bet. The fund does not publish additional commentary on these positions and has not changed its official policy on direct digital asset investment. The same logic applies well beyond NBIM: other large index funds and pension systems that track broad market benchmarks theoretically pick up the same side effect, they simply rarely disclose it in as much detail as the Norwegian fund does.

Critics of the approach note that an 86% concentration of indirect exposure in a single company leaves NBIM's portfolio vulnerable to risks specific to Strategy, not just to swings in bitcoin's price. If Strategy's stock were to fall because of its debt obligations or other corporate issues, the fund's losses could exceed what a direct move in the coin's price alone would produce.