JPMorgan: Bitcoin May Outpace Gold as BlackRock’s IBIT Hedging Stays Elevated

What’s verified: Three outlets, u.today, CoinGape and The Block, published the same claim on or around September 17, 2026, all attributing it to a single JPMorgan research note authored by a team led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou. The underlying event is one bank’s positioning call, not new market data. None of the three reports cite a second independent source for the specific hedging figures behind it.

What the JPMorgan note actually says

JPMorgan analysts argue that Bitcoin could pick up relative ground against gold if investors start unwinding the elevated hedges built around crypto exchange-traded funds. Their reasoning centers on a positioning gap: institutional exposure to both Bitcoin and gold ETFs remains substantial, but investors in Bitcoin funds, including BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), are running much more defensive downside protection than holders of major gold ETFs.

The bank’s argument is conditional. If that hedging demand fades and sentiment around Bitcoin improves, JPMorgan says the asset has more room to recover relative to gold than its current positioning would suggest. No target price or percentage estimate for either asset accompanies the claim in the reporting reviewed.

One bank, three headlines

All three outlets frame the story identically: a JPMorgan call, not an independently confirmed market shift. That distinction matters for anyone treating this as a signal rather than an opinion. A research note from one bank, however widely quoted, is still a single source until a second desk publishes its own analysis of the same positioning data.

Readers building on aggregated crypto news feeds should note that repetition across outlets here reflects wire pickup of one JPMorgan document, not three separate confirmations of the underlying hedging figures. The claim itself is not wrong. It simply has one origin.

The July Fed rebound in both metals

The one piece of shared market context across the reports is that both Bitcoin and gold ETFs saw renewed inflows after the Federal Reserve’s July meeting. Investors reportedly rotated back into the so-called debasement trade, a bet that currency depreciation risk favors hard assets over cash. That inflow pattern is presented as background to JPMorgan’s positioning comparison rather than as a separate, newly confirmed data point.

What’s still unclear from the public reporting: the exact size of the hedging gap between IBIT and comparable gold funds, which specific gold ETFs JPMorgan used for the comparison, and the dollar or percentage scale of the July inflows into either asset. Until JPMorgan’s full note or a second analyst shop publishes comparable figures, those numbers remain outside what can be verified from the current coverage.

Read more: Bitcoin Near $78,700 as Fed Hike Odds Split 62%–90% Across Three Trackers

Sources

• u.today
• coingape.com
• theblock.co