The stock traded crypto market is booming in Europe with Invesco joining the party as it launches on Germany’s Xetra the Invesco Physical Bitcoin ETP (BTIC).
Listed on the Deutsche Borse, the exchange traded product (ETP) has an annual fee of 0.99% with it tracking the CoinShares Bitcoin Hourly Reference Rate index.
Trading began on Friday with it up 5% since as the stock traded crypto market starts becoming competitive in the continent.
“We have been pushed over the last couple of years by institutional clients and had to look at how we can access this space well,” said Gary Buxton, head of EMEA ETFs at Invesco.
Invesco withdrew last month an application for a bitcoin ETP in USA, stating they wanted a mix of futures swaps, physical Bitcoin and private funds in the Bitcoin industry.
“We thought that CME futures were going to be a very effective element of the portfolio. We never thought they would be effective when they would be 100% of the product,” said Anna Paglia, global head of ETFs at Invesco.
So they went to Europe where they are free to launch a product they think protects investors while providing exposure. Buxton says:
“Physical bitcoin is a more observable marketplace. One of our concerns was the depth of synthetic liquidity as well as what that may do to valuations over time and that is something we were not wholly comfortable with.
It is not an aversion to synthetics; it is about how appropriate physical or synthetic is for a particular asset type. We were just more comfortable with the physical assets in this instance.”
While Invesco enters, WisdomTree expands with three new ETPs, all holding the actual crypto in a safe and secure manner.
The WisdomTree Crypto Market (BLOC), Wisdomtree Crypto Altcoins (WALT) and the WisdomTree Crypto Mega Cap Equal Weight (MEGA) are listed on SIX and Deutsche Boerse.
They’re designed to provide wider exposure to cryptos beyond the top two, although including them as well in their weighting, with the asset manager claiming their eth inclusion provides indirect exposure to defi and nfts.
Which is indeed the case because of the burning, but a better indirect exposure may be something like Tokens.com which also trades in US under Smurf in OTCMarkets, as well as in Europe (FSE:76M) and Canada (NEO:COIN).
They’ve doubled this month, perhaps because people are just finding out about them, with it having a market cap of just 250 million Canadian dollars.
They invest in defi, crypto staking, the metaverse, and also bought some shibs (lol). So that makes them riskier, but gives more choice to dice and slice the portfolio, with this being one of the few that we are aware of which provides exposure to defi and nft frontiers.
We expect a lot more will be coming and all in Europe with some in Canada as the digital assets space roams free in the continent.
