The first investment funds that directly trade Bitcoin were listed on the stock exchange in the United States today after the historic decision of the Securities & Exchange Commission (Sec) which yesterday evening approved the requests of eleven US securities companies intending to launch their “spot” ETFs on this cryptocurrency on regulated markets.
According to definition of the Italian Stock Exchange, “ETFs (acronym for Exchange Traded Funds) are funds (…) with low management fees traded on the stock exchange like normal shares. They are characterized by the fact that they have the sole objective of faithfully replicating the performance and therefore the performance of stock, bond or raw material indices” or, in this case, of Bitcoin.
The news made the cryptocurrency gain 3%, trading this morning at around 47 thousand dollars, well below the record of 69 thousand reached in November 2021 but almost three times higher than the lows of 16 thousand dollars in December 2022 (when the market collapsed Ftx cryptocurrencies).
After months of waiting and a bitter legal dispute, the SEC has authorized ARK 21 Shares, Invesco Galaxy, VanEck, WisdomTree, Fidelity, Valkyrie, BlackRock, Grayscale, Bitwise, Hashdex and Franklin Templeton to list their “spot” ETFs on the market in Bitcoin, the first in history.
Until now, anyone wanting to invest in this cryptocurrency had only two options: buy or sell Bitcoin directly on an unregulated market or turn to a handful of ETF funds which however only invest in Bitcoin futures contracts, speculating on the future trend of their price.
From today, however, it is possible to invest directly in the first “spot” ETFs, i.e. those that trade directly on Bitcoin, such as BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) listed on the Nasdaq, where at the beginning of the session it earned just over 27%, or Grayscale's NYSE-listed Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC), where it has debuted with a more modest +4%.
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