In brief
- Goldman Sachs agreed to acquire NEOS Investments in a deal worth up to $2.25 billion, adding about $30 billion in options-based income ETFs—including one of the market's largest Bitcoin covered-call funds.
- The purchase gives Goldman a ready-made crypto income ETF business, a far faster path than its own April filing for a Bitcoin Premium ETF that some analysts saw as an attempt to leapfrog a similar BlackRock product.
- The move rides a boom in derivative-income ETFs—roughly $180 billion in assets and a 70%+ annual growth rate since 2021, per Morningstar—with crypto an increasingly prominent slice.
Goldman Sachs is buying its way into crypto income funds, striking a deal worth up to $2.25 billion to acquire NEOS Investments, the ETF specialist behind one of the market's largest Bitcoin covered-call products.
The Wall Street firm said Tuesday the cash-and-equity purchase, contingent on certain performance and service targets, will fold NEOS's roughly $30 billion in options-based income ETFs into Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
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The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, pending regulatory approval. While the announcement centered on NEOS's broader derivative-income lineup rather than crypto, the acquisition quietly delivers Goldman a foothold in digital-asset ETFs it had been building toward on its own.
That foothold runs through NEOS's flagship Bitcoin covered-call fund, BTCI, which has amassed around $1 billion in assets since launching. The strategy generates monthly income by selling options against Bitcoin exposure—handing investors yield in exchange for capping some upside—and NEOS runs a similar Ethereum product, giving Goldman instant scale in a niche it had only just entered on paper.
Goldman filed in April for its own Bitcoin Premium ETF, a fund designed to throw off income by writing options tied to spot Bitcoin ETFs. As Decrypt reported at the time, the structure led some analysts to speculate Goldman was angling to leapfrog a comparable BlackRock filing. Buying NEOS outright is a far faster route, absorbing an established manager and its crypto funds rather than waiting for a newly launched product to gain traction.
The purchase lands as derivative-income ETFs surge into one of the fastest-growing corners of the market, expanding to roughly $180 billion in assets with a compound annual growth rate topping 70% since 2021, according to Morningstar. Crypto has become an increasingly prominent slice of that category as issuers race to wrap Bitcoin and Ethereum in yield-bearing structures.
Chairman and CEO David Solomon, who has described himself as holding “very little, but some” Bitcoin, framed the deal in terms of NEOS's income and outcome strategies broadly.
Co-founders Garrett Paolella and Troy Cates will join Goldman Sachs Asset Management as partners once the transaction closes.
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