New Bitcoin ETFs Raise Questions About Disclosure Rules As They 'Open Up a New Market'
After a strong debut, investors should expect proper disclosure rules for Bitcoin ETFs
Now that the U.S. has granted regulatory approval to exchange-traded funds based on Bitcoin the tricky but necessary question arises: who’s responsible for keeping investors updated on changes or key events in the world’s most-valuable cryptocurrency?
Bitcoin has no CEO, no board of directors and no single group can dictate how its protocol is managed. That’s the beauty of the technology invented by Satoshi Nakamoto. But in the traditional financial realm that lack of control and oversight gets messy. The investors who’ve poured $4.7 billion into the various Bitcoin ETFs (minus Grayscale, which we’ll get to in a minute) as of Jan. 24 should certainly want to know how major events in Bitcoin will affect their investment.
Traditional ETFs come in two varieties, said Rob Krugman, chief digital officer at the technology and trading firm Broadridge. They’re either based on securities like stocks and bonds or on commodities like oil and gold.
“The big difference is that if you think about gold, I don’t think we have to spend a lot of time educating ourselves on what gold is,” Krugman said. Broadridge released a survey of 2,000 investors last year that found small percentages of investors look to crypto-native metrics like protocol performance and tokenomics when making decisions on where to put their money. “When we think about digital assets, one thing that our survey demonstrated is that we probably need to educate folks a little bit on what these assets are about.”
Read more: Crypto Investors Are Neglecting Key Metrics, Broadridge Survey Finds
Events that can affect the economics of Bitcoin include the approaching halving when the Bitcoin mining reward is cut in half, or the public and often acrimonious debate that culminated in 2017 about the amount of blockspace in the network. And it’s not just Bitcoin. In 2022, Google Cloud announced it was running a validator on the Solana blockchain, news that would certainly move the price and in the regulated markets must be disclosed to investors.
“There are real differences here, right?” Krugman said. “This is not buying shares in a company. The way governance works can vary greatly.” For example, he said, there were about 1,500 governance proposals for the Ethereum blockchain last year. “Some of them were minor proposals that wouldn’t have much of an effect, some of them were major proposals,” Krugman said. “What does that mean for the asset going forward, and how do we describe that to people?”
More investor education could also help rebuff naysayer arguments against crypto that it’s made up or that it’s a Ponzi scheme, Krugman said.
James Seyffart, an ETF research analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, said while he agreed that Bitcoin and other crypto is a new kind of beast, there is a lot of good information investors can access about Bitcoin.
“It’s a commodity, so those arguments you could make in a similar way for gold,” Seyffart said. “The data on Bitcoin itself is a lot more readily available” than with gold, he said. “If you compare it to a traditional stock or bond there are no cash flow, you don’t know exactly who’s behind it, but it’s transparent and you can see what’s going on.”
One fascinating outcome of the new BTC ETFs is how Grayscale has seen an enormous exodus from its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. GBTC, as it’s known, was an early workaround for Bitcoin exposure before the SEC had approved the Bitcoin ETFs, though it has had significant price distortions almost throughout its entire history. According to data gathered by Seyffart, $4 billion has left GBTC in the eight days since the ETFs began trading.
One reason for that is because of the collapse of the price distortions. Shares in the fund traded at times for more than 20 percent above their value according to the amount of Bitcoin they represented, what’s known as a premium, so investors would buy say $1 million in Bitcoin to give to Grayscale to then receive GBTC shares that were valued on the secondary market at $1.2 million. After a lockup, the shares were sold for an easy $200,000 profit. On the downside, GBTC were at times valued as much as 50 percent below the Bitcoin value, what’s known as a discount, Seyffart said. In this instance, investors would buy $1 million in GBTC shares on the secondary market and redeem them at Grayscale for Bitcoin that was worth $1.5 million. Of course, those trades couldn’t last forever.
“Now that that trade is over and the arb is gone and the discount is gone they’re unwinding that so some of the money coming out is unlikely to find its way back into anything,” Seyffart said. Grayscale also charges a 1.5 percent annual fee, where many of the new BTC ETFs have no fees, so some investors want out to avoid those charges, he said.
More broadly, “these ETFs open up a new market,” Seyffart said. “This increases the addressable market for this asset because there were no real options that any large number of advisors were going to use for long-term investment for their clients.” Prior to the ETFs coming to market it was “a hassle” to get exposure to Bitcoin in an investment product, he said.
“It’s way easier to have this thing that’s cheap, liquid, efficient and I trust it and I just click a button in a way that I would normally click a button and buy any other fund or ETF,” Seyffart said. “So that addressable market is something that’s going to play out over the long term in months and years an not something we’re going to see in the first few days of trading.”