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.