The first ETF based on the price of Bitcoin was launched on Wall Street

The first bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) appeared on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday 19 October. It was launched by the ProShares company and it has been a great success for now, as it closed the trading day at + 4.85%, the second most traded ETF ever at its debut.

This is an important novelty for the world of cryptocurrencies, after financial supervisors had been blocking such products for years. More are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, this as the value of bitcoin continues to rise and has surpassed the April record of $ 64,859.

The new ProShares etf

ProShares is a group active since 2006 that offers about 130 exchange-traded funds (ETFs), passively managed investment funds. In August, they made an official request to the SEC, the highest authority in the United States in the regulation of exchanges and corporate securities, to list on the New York Stock Exchange a new product that follows the trend of bitcoin futures contracts, the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy Etf. (Bito). Not a product that invests directly in bitcoin therefore, but exposed to its price changes through derivatives already existing on the market. That is to say, on contracts that speculate on the future price of bitcoin, which will not necessarily correspond to its real price.

The SEC had 75 days to express any objections, which however did not arrive. If in the last four years the US authority under the leadership of Jay Clayton had rejected at least ten investment solutions of this type, with the new boss who took office in August Gary Gensler it was immediately understood that things would change, given that he himself had made openings to ETFs linked to cryptocurrency futures. This is how the official debut of the ProShares investment fund took place on Tuesday 19 October, the first of its kind eight years after the first proposal, which in one day saw its price rise from $ 40 to $ 41.94. a + 4.85%. According to Elisabeth Kashner, director of research on ETFs at FactSet, that constitutes the second best debut ever in terms of exchanges (over a billion dollars in value) for a product in this category.