The North Carolina Retirement Systems began investing in holdings tied to cryptocurrency in recent years, and in 2025, state lawmakers began pushing for a law that could enable even more direct investments in Bitcoin and other options, over the objection of state employees whose paychecks fund the pension plan.
The proposal to ramp up the pension plan’s crypto investments passed the state House last year and could be taken up this year by the state Senate. The legislature is expected to return to session in March. But in the last few months, the state has seen more than half the value of its cryptocurrency investments wiped out, with losses on paper totaling tens of millions of dollars as of this week.
The paper loss represents a very small blip — less than 1% — in a fund worth more than $140 billion. And the state is still holding onto its crypto investments, so it hasn’t lost money yet. But some state employee advocates say the loss underscores why the plan shouldn’t invest in such assets. The state treasurer, who oversees the plan, says it’s too early to tell.
The state’s investment in a crypto fund called Strategy had a $51 million valuation as of Sept. 30, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The state has continued buying shares in Strategy since then, according to Fintel, an investment research company that tracks the holdings of many large funds.
Over the past five years, Bitcoin has increased in value by almost 50%. But in recent months, Bitcoin has taken a dive, tumbling 75% since reaching an all-time high on Oct. 4. Bitcoin is a major part of the Strategy fund.
As of Friday, the Office of the State Treasurer confirmed, the state’s Strategy holdings were worth just $18 million, down about 65% from Sept. 30.
State Treasurer Brad Briner — who spent years in New York managing investments for institutions and wealthy individuals before taking office — isn’t overly concerned at this point. Pension fund managers are tasked with investing with a view toward how those investments perform over the course of decades, not months or years. They do that by taking bets on a mixture of cash, bonds, safe stocks and more volatile investments.
“Even on tough days, our portfolio is balanced and is well above our 6.5% annual growth target since I assumed office as State Treasurer,” Briner told WRAL in a written statement.
In the $142 billion pension plan, the state’s crypto investments make up only a fraction of a percent of its total holdings. North Carolina’s biggest investments are in some of the country’s biggest companies; the plan held more than $1 billion each in NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon as of late 2025.
The state’s investment in Strategy and similar funds tied to crypto markets began under former Treasurer Dale Folwell and have continued under Briner, who took over the office last year. Both are Republicans.
The Strategy fund represents a large part of the state’s exposure to cryptocurrency but isn’t its only investment affected by the crypto market. North Carolina also owns shares of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange. Those holdings have also lost more than half their value in recent months: Down from $32 million on Sept. 30 to an estimated $15 million.
Additionally, the pension plan is invested in Robinhood Markets, an electronic trading platform that operates cryptocurrency wallets and facilitates trades of stock, cryptocurrency and more. Its stock is also down, due in part to the Bitcoin plunge. The state’s Robinhood holdings are down 41% since September to about $38 million.
For state-employee advocates such as Ardis Watkins, who leads the State Employees Association of North Carolina, the crypto tumble shows why her group fought against the state being allowed to invest in it in the first place.
“Crypto is a roller coaster, period,” she said in an interview. “That’s what our experience as a nation has brought us to. There’s really high highs, and there’s incredibly low lows. It doesn’t seem like a great item or a suitable thing for something like a retirement plan.”
‘Diamond hands’
One of the top priorities of new N.C. House Speaker Destin Hall in 2025 was to add cryptocurrency to the state pension.
Crypto billionaires and companies have given massive amounts of money to help elect Republicans, and a few Democrats, up and down the ballot in many states. Originally Hall proposed allowing the pension plan to invest as much as 10% of its wealth into crypto.
After heavy pushback from groups such as SEANC, as well individual state workers, retirees and fellow GOP lawmakers, Hall and other supporters agreed to water down their proposal to 5%.
It wasn’t only Republicans in the legislature pushing for the change. Some Democrats backed the idea and some Republicans, particularly older members, expressing doubts about the wisdom of crypto investments in committee hearings, but ultimately voting to approve the idea in face of heavy pressure from GOP leadership.
State Rep. Mike Schietzelt, a 39-year-old Wake County Republican who has been among the more vocal supporters of getting the state into crypto investing, said he and other lawmakers who backed it were clear-eyed about the high-risk, high-reward nature of the market. While Bitcoin doesn’t look great now, he said, he’s confident another swing is coming.
“This is part of the cryptocurrency cycles we’ve seen over the last 8 to 10 years,” Schietzelt said in an interview. “There are occasional significant dips, followed by significant rises. There are bear runs, then bull runs, then bear runs, then bull runs. It’s so common there are memes about it. … You can see these unrealized losses and panic, or you can understand that this moves in cycles.”
He expressed confidence in Briner to handle the state’s investments wisely.
“Treasurer Briner has diamond hands,” Schietzelt said. “He’s a sophisticated investor who understands how these markets behave.”
Watkins also said she trusts Briner, saying there might not be anyone in the state who knows more about investing. But even if Bitcoin shoots back up in a year and the state’s investments look better than they currently do, Watkins said, she’d still be against having people’s pensions rely on it.
“It can soar, and then it can bottom out,” she said. “But retirement plans have to pay every month. And they have to be planned, over decades, to be there for the people when they get there. So doing the chasing like you would in a casino — ‘Oh, I hit it big. Now I lost big, but no big deal, because I hit it big’ — that’s not going to work for retirement. It’s not. It would be a disaster.”
Briner noted that every investment has its ups and downs. The state’s exposure to the stock market is much greater than it is to crypto, he said, noting that last week, on Friday alone — when Amazon stock had a small, single-digit dip — the state took a bigger loss from that one stock on that one day than it’s ever lost, combined, on cryptocurrencies.
But the state’s not ditching its Amazon stock, and it’s not ditching its crypto holdings, either.
“The first priority of our investment team is to keep our employee and retiree money secure and growing,” Briner said. “As someone who has been investing for my entire career, I am reminded daily that investments in the stock market always have good days and bad days.”