- Headquartered in London, Jacobi Asset Management first announced its plans to launch the Bitcoin ETF in July 2022.
- But the company has put its plans on hold due to last year’s disastrous crypto outages.
In an extraordinary development, Europe’s first Bitcoin [BTC] exchange-traded fund (ETF) launches this month.
This is reported by a recent Financial Times reportJacobi Asset Management will soon publicly list its Bitcoin ETF on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange.
The asset management company, headquartered in London, received regulatory approval from the Guernsey Financial Services Commission (GFSC) for its ETF in October 2021. The company announced its plans to launch the ETF on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange in July 2022.
However, the company did not launch the product last year. We can attribute the reasons for this year-long delay to multiple crypto failures in 2022.
Last year we saw the to collapse of the Terra [LUNA] ecosystem in May and that of the FTX crypto exchange in November.
According to experts, these catastrophic events prompted Jacobi to proceed with caution as he launched his Bitcoin ETF. It will come out soon with the BCOIN ticker.
The wealth management firm has partnered with Fidelity Digital Assets to offer asset custody services to its users. It also partners with Flow Traders and DRW to enable trading of the ETF on the exchange.
Jacobi underscores the nature of his Bitcoin ETF
The report highlights an important factor underlying the nature of Bitcoin.
Until now, all exchange-traded digital asset products in Europe have been structured as exchange traded notes (ETNs) rather than funds (ETFs).
ETF shareholders own a portion of a fund’s underlying stocks. However, an ETN shareholder owns part of the debt security, not the underlying asset itself.
Company co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Peter Lane told Europe ignites last year,
There is so much misinformation and misuse of the term ETF by [ETN] issuers, presumably to obscure the risks inherent in acquiring and investing in ETNs.
Jacobi has strongly emphasized that the company is launching a (Bitcoin) ETF rather than an ETN. The company stated that unlike ETNs, its ETF cannot be leveraged or use derivatives, which could otherwise lead to “significant counterparty risk”.
The State of Bitcoin ETFs in the US
In the US, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently approved the first leveraged Bitcoin Futures ETF, namely the Volatility Shares 2x Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITX).
Several major financial firms, including Black rock, WisdomTree, Valkyrie, Invesco, et al. recently filed for spot Bitcoin ETFs with the SEC. We have yet to see if the regulator will approve these applications