World’s Biggest Bitcoin Holder Grayscale Launches ETF in Europe

Key Insights:

• Grayscale announced the Future of Finance UCITS ETF yesterday.
• The ETF will be listed on three exchanges and passported for sale across Europe.
• Institutional investors have been pretty interested in Bitcoin recently.

In an announcement today, the world’s largest digital currency asset manager, Grayscale, confirmed that it would be bringing its first European ETF called the Grayscale Future of Finance UCITS ETF (GFOF).

Europe Gets a Slice of Grayscale

The launch of the ETF is coming right after the crypto market witnessed one of the worst crashes in its history, which even took Bitcoin below $30k at one point.

However, unlike Grayscale’s other ETFs that track a cryptocurrency asset, the GFOF ETF will be tracking the investment performance of the Bloomberg Grayscale Future of Finance Index.

This index comprises of companies from three sections of the industry – Financial Foundations, Technology Solutions, and Digital Asset Infrastructure.

Set to be listed on three exchanges initially, the GFOF will be available on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), Borsa Italiana, and Deutsche Börse Xetra.

Commenting on the launch, the CEO of Grayscale Investments, Michael Sonnenshein, stated,

“With growing global demand from both institutional and individual investors for Grayscale products, we’re thrilled to be expanding our offering in Europe through the UCITS wrapper. This product draws upon our historical strengths, while furthering our evolution as an asset manager that helps investors build portfolios that can stand the test of time. GFOF UCITS ETF is the natural next step in our global strategic journey.”

The Right Time To Jump In?

The overall condition of the market worsened significantly earlier this week after the market crashed and lost $500+ billion. Since then, the king coin has been making some recovery rising by 8.23% in the span of 3 days.

Even at the time of writing, BTC has increased by 2.3% and is trading at $30.8k.

Incidentally, this crash was a golden opportunity for institutional investors who bought almost $300 million worth of Bitcoin this week from the market-wide sell-off.

Up until the market bottomed, mostly this cohort of investors was focused on dumping their holdings, but that changed after almost every asset fell by a significant margin after May 9.

But Grayscale’s flagship Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC), on the other hand, is not noticing as much interest from investors since the ETF is losing demand with the growing bearishness in the market.

Trading at a discount of 31.38%, GBTC is at its lowest point since February 2020.