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Alaska’s public pension fund has quietly become part of the growing list of institutional investors with Bitcoin on their books, at least indirectly. The Alaska Retirement Management Board, which manages retirement assets for roughly 100,000 state employees and beneficiaries, disclosed a holding of 19,804 Class A shares of Strive Inc. in its most recent quarterly filing.
Strive trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker ASST and operates as a Bitcoin treasury company, meaning its balance sheet is built around holding Bitcoin rather than generating revenue in the traditional sense.
What ARMB actually owns
The position is modest in absolute dollar terms. ARMB’s Strive stake was valued at $216,000 as of Q2 2026, up from $198,000 the prior quarter. For a fund sitting on roughly $46 billion in total assets, that is approximately 0.0005% of the portfolio. The holding sits inside a roughly $10 billion passive equity sleeve, where it functions as an incidental exposure rather than a deliberate Bitcoin bet.
ARMB has no direct allocation to crypto assets, and board discussions about digital currencies have historically stopped well short of a formal position. Owning Strive through a passive index vehicle means the fund didn’t have to make an active decision to buy Bitcoin-adjacent equity.
How Strive became a Bitcoin treasury company
Strive did not start as a crypto firm. Vivek Ramaswamy founded it as an anti-ESG asset manager, building a brand around the idea that corporations should focus on financial returns rather than social or environmental mandates. That chapter ended in 2025 when Strive completed a merger and pivoted into the Bitcoin treasury model.
Strive currently holds approximately 20,020 BTC, a position worth around $1.3 billion. The average acquisition cost across that stack sits near $94,700 per coin. Strive measures every other potential investment against what it would cost to simply buy more Bitcoin, treating BTC as the baseline rather than an alternative asset.
The broader pattern: pensions and Bitcoin by accident
As Bitcoin treasury companies have grown large enough to enter major equity indexes, passive funds that track those indexes have accumulated exposure without any deliberate asset allocation decision. Vanguard, one of the most famously Bitcoin-skeptical major asset managers, ended up with Strive and similar holdings in index products for exactly this reason. When the companies get big enough, the indexes include them, and the passive money follows automatically.
A pension board can maintain a formal policy of zero direct crypto exposure while simultaneously owning economic interest in billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, all through routine passive equity investing.
What this means for public employees and the fund
For the 100,000 Alaskan public employees whose retirement savings sit with ARMB, the practical impact of this holding is negligible. A $216,000 position in a $46 billion fund moves the needle by essentially nothing.
Five years ago, a pension board member raising Bitcoin in a meeting risked being dismissed as out of touch with fiduciary duty. Today, the conversation at ARMB is documented in meeting minutes, and the holding is disclosed in a routine 13F filing, treated as just another line item in a diversified equity portfolio.
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