The municipal pension plan of Jersey City, New Jersey, will soon invest in bitcoin via exchange-traded funds, according to a Thursday social media post from Mayor Steven Fulop.
While it's not likely to be a gigantic sum, the decision is another symbolic win for cryptocurrency on the road toward wider adoption. The move follows a Wisconsin pension making a similar decision earlier this year.
Fulop, who has been the mayor of Jersey City since 2013, took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce the forthcoming investment, writing: “Not my normal subject matter in a post but I’ll share anyway – the question on whether [c]rypto/Bitcoin is here to stay is largely over [and] crypto/Bitcoin won.”
Fulop, a Democrat, has thrown his hat into the ring for New Jersey’s 2025 gubernatorial election. Incumbent Governor Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, has already served two terms and is ineligible for reelection.
Fulop added that the city’s pension fund, the Employees Retirement System of Jersey City, is currently in the process of updating paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to allocate a percentage of the fund to bitcoin (BTC) ETFs. According to Fulop’s tweet, the investment is expected to be completed “by end of the summer.”
Though Fulop did not specify exactly how much of the pension funds' assets under management will be allocated to bitcoin ETFs, he said it would be “similar” to the 2% allocation to bitcoin ETFs made by Wisconsin’s state pension fund earlier this year. Fulop did not specify which bitcoin ETF Jersey City was considering selecting for its investment.
“I’ve been a long time believer (through ups/downs) in crypto but [b]roadly, beyond crypto [I] do believe blockchain is amongst the most important new technology innovations since the internet,” Fulop said.
Interest in bitcoin from public pension funds is growing slowly but surely.
Wisconsin’s public pension plan – the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, which has roughly $156 billion in assets under management – is the biggest pension plan to dive into crypto so far, with a $160 million investment into spot bitcoin ETFs earlier this year. Some small pension funds like the Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund, which has about $5 billion in assets under management, have been invested in crypto for several years.
The pensions of Fairfax County, Virginia, also invested in crypto exposure through VanEck's New Finance Income Fund, which became a creditor to crypto firm Genesis as it filed for bankruptcy last year.
Outside of the U.S., public pension plans including Japan’s $1.4 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund, the largest pension plan in the world, put out a request for information on bitcoin investments earlier this year.
“I’m sure eventually it will be more common,” Fulop said of pension funds allocating to crypto in his tweet.
The Jersey City Mayor’s Office did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment by publication time.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
