Nearly two years after it was initially approved, London-based Jacobi Asset Management has listed Europe’s first spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) on Euronext Amsterdam.The Guernsey Financial Services Commission (GFSC) oversees the Jacobi FT Wilshere Bitcoin ETF, which will trade with the symbol “BCOIN.” According to a Tuesday announcement by Jacobi, Fidelity Digital Assets will be in charge of the fund’s custody, and Flow Traders will serve as the market maker. In October 2021, Jacobi received authorisation for the fund, with the intention of listing it the following year. Due to unfavorable conditions elsewhere in the market for digital assets, like the failure of the Terra ecosystem and the bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX, the company decided to delay its ambitions.
Exchange-traded products (ETPs), which is another name for exchange-traded notes (ETNs), are widely used in Europe, but Jacobi’s offering is the first ETF.ETN investors own a debt security, whereas ETF owners own a fraction of the product’s underlying shares. Unlike ETNs, according to Jacobi, its ETF cannot be leveraged or use derivatives. Despite dozens of petitions to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the last few years that were all refused, the listing implies that Europe will see a spot bitcoin ETF traded before the U.S.
However, after asset management behemoth BlackRock (BLK) spearheaded a rush of new applications incorporating “surveillance-sharing” agreements intended to prevent market manipulation, there has been renewed optimism that the regulator will authorize a spot bitcoin fund.