Bitcoin briefly entered a bear market earlier, tumbling 21% over seven sessions before staging a sharp rebound in early European trading - up 7.5% off its lows of about $78.4k. 

The turnaround was partially fueled by BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, after news hit via Bloomberg that it enabled its entire model portfolio business to allocate funds into the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT).

"We believe Bitcoin has long-term investment merit and can potentially provide unique and additive sources of diversification to portfolios," Michael Gates, lead portfolio manager for BlackRock's Target Allocation ETF model portfolio suite, wrote in investment commentary on Thursday.

The IBIT addition presents a potential new source of demand for the ETF, as Bitcoin trades around the $84k mark at lunchtime.

Goldman Sachs' Blake Germani, Suzanne Dannheim, and Solo Semenyuk provided fresh insights into institutional crypto sentiment in a client note Friday, summarizing key takeaways from the firm's latest digital assets survey for the fourth quarter of top hedge fund managers and asset allocators worldwide:

• 62% trade physical crypto or products linked to crypto (directly or indirectly)

• 65% expect to maintain or increase their crypto holdings within the next 12 months

• 50% believe counterparty risk is the most important aspect when picking a spot cryptocurrency trading counterparty

Here's the survey:

Institutional ownership of digital assets is rising in President Trump's second term.