Jacobi Asset Management, based in London, has listed Europe’s first spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) on Euronext Amsterdam, two years after it was first approved. The Jacobi FT Wilshere Bitcoin ETF, regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission (GFSC), will trade under the ticker BCOIN. Fidelity Digital Assets provides custody for the fund, while trading firm Flow Traders operates as market maker.
Jacobi first won approval for the fund in October 2021 with plans to list it in 2022, said the firm. However, the firm opted to push back its plans due to inopportune circumstances elsewhere in the digital asset market, such as the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and the bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX.
The ETF is different from exchange-traded notes (ETNs) or exchange-traded products (ETPs) in that ETF shareholders own a portion of the product’s underlying shares, while ETN investors own a debt security. Jacobi has said its ETF cannot be leveraged or use derivatives, unlike ETNs.
Europe will now see a spot bitcoin ETF traded before the U.S., despite the SEC rejecting dozens of applications in the last few years. However, asset management giant BlackRock (BLK) has led a flurry of new applications featuring surveillance-sharing agreements designed to guard against market manipulation, giving renewed hope that the regulator would approve a spot bitcoin fund.