Goldman Sachs just wrote a $2.25 billion check to become a major player in Bitcoin income products. The investment bank announced on August 12 that it will acquire NEOS Investments, a firm that has quietly built a dominant position in options-based income ETFs, including one of the largest Bitcoin yield funds on the market.
The deal, structured as a mix of cash and equity with performance-based contingencies, would add roughly $30 billion in active income ETFs to Goldman Sachs Asset Management. That figure includes approximately $1.1 billion across three crypto income ETFs, headlined by the NEOS Bitcoin High Income ETF (BTCI), which targets an annualized yield of around 27%.
How a 27% yield on Bitcoin actually works
BTCI generates its income through covered-call strategies on spot Bitcoin ETPs. The fund holds Bitcoin exposure through spot ETPs, then sells call options against that position. It collects the option premiums as income, which gets distributed to investors. The trade-off is that the fund caps its upside when Bitcoin rallies sharply, since it’s obligated to sell at the strike price of those calls.
Bitcoin’s volatility means the premiums collected are substantially fatter than what you’d earn running the same strategy on, say, the S&P 500.
