Bitcoin ETF Issuer VanEck Has Huge Crypto Growth Goals in Europe

VanEck, a 69-year-old asset manager with a history of bringing newfangled investments to customers, has high hopes for the role crypto will play in its European division.

Today, roughly 10% of the business' assets under management come from crypto products and 90% derive from conventional investing through ETFs, Martijn Rozemuller, the CEO of VanEck Europe, said in an interview.

“I think that balance will shift,” he said. “Crypto will become more important … and it will be closer to 50/50.”

It's a big growth goal from an emerging asset class, one that optimists see enticing a broader collection of investors, especially now that spot bitcoin ETFs have been approved in the U.S. That is familiar turf for VanEck, though, a U.S.-based company that was a pioneer in letting Americans buy international assets in the 1950s and then created a gold fund in the 1960s.

Rozemuller’s interest in crypto was something that he shared with VanEck CEO Jan Van Eck, and that potentially bolstered the acquisition and formation of the company’s Europe division. In 2018, VanEck acquired a Dutch ETF provider called Think ETF Asset Management, founded by Rozemuller.

“As soon as we got together with Jan, even probably before the acquisition, bitcoin was definitely a topic,” Rozemuller said. “Jan mentioned that he was already looking at ways to maybe do something in the U.S. We told him, 'Well, we're actually working on something in Europe, too.'”

VanEck introduced one of the 10 new U.S.-traded spot bitcoin ETFs that debuted in January, but it's been a participant in crypto its larger rival BlackRock. VanEck first filed to launch an ETF tied to the price of bitcoin in 2017.

VanEck Europe, the issuer of roughly 50 ETFs on stock exchanges across the continent, launched the VanEck Crypto and Blockchain Innovators UCITS ETF in 2021; it holds the stock of Coinbase Global, Block, Marathon Digital, Bitfarms and MicroStrategy, among other smaller allocations.

The fund is among the 15 top-performing ETFs in VanEck Europe’s portfolio by assets under management, even though it’s been a lot more volatile than most other products.

A big reason behind Rozemuller’s passion for crypto is one that isn’t often heard. He believes that people should be investing in a more “sensible way,” he said, not simply to chase performance and make a quick profit but rather to be in it for the long run. A lot of the investors of VanEck Europe’s crypto ETF are just that, he said. “I personally like that a lot.”

In the future, VanEck Europe, which describes itself as a firm that brings a “special twist,” wants to be the go-to issuer for all things “non-mainstream,” even though the company is already a leader in the field.

“There's some competitors that have really nice ETFs. There's competitors that really focus on exchange-traded notes when it comes to crypto. But there's not many that do both and do both really well and really make a positive difference,” Rozemuller said.