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One of the world’s biggest asset manager with $600 billion to invest, Fidelity, has launched two physical bitcoin Exchange Traded Products (ETPs).
Trading starts later today on the Swiss Six stock exchange for a USD and a CHF tracker.
“The launch of the Fidelity Physical Bitcoin ETP is an important evolution of our exchange traded product offering and the first step in our digital assets product capability,” said Nick King, Head of ETFs at Fidelity, before adding:
“Working with best-in-class service providers, including Fidelity Digital Assets and Brown Brothers Harriman, has allowed us to deliver an extremely robust product structure which allows our clients in Europe to obtain access to Bitcoin in a secure and convenient way.”
Brown Brothers Harriman are the administrators. Fidelity Digital Asset Services is to act as custodian for these 100% bitcoin backed stock traded products.
According to the stats page, this is going for $4 per share under the ticker of FBTC, tracking the Fidelity Bitcoin Index – Price Return – London FIX, with Flow Traders to act as market makers.
Flow Traders, Europe’s biggest EFT trader, began entering the crypto space in 2018 just when crypto ETPs were starting to take off in Europe.
Since then, the number of crypto trades on the exchange has increased more than 6x, the exchange says, as “in total, 354,542 trades were carried out in crypto products, an increase of 634% compared to 2020 (48,300).”
Crypto volumes have increased too, with trading turnover reaching CHF 8.6 billion, an increase of 673% compared with the previous year (CHF 1.1 bn).
While in the United States there is yet not even one bitcoin stock traded product as the world’s biggest economy gets bogged down in bureaucracy.
Europe, in contrast, has 208 products based on 18 cryptocurrencies just on this Swiss exchange. There are many others that list crypto ETPs, including Deutsche Borse, but to show how much this has grown, just Six says they have 133 crypto ETPs from 10 issuers.
Indicating crypto is booming in the world’s second biggest economy as one block, which may revitalize wider European stocks too as EU is now leading in some areas, like proper innovative flying cars.
