Europe Beats U.S. for First Spot Bitcoin ETF Launch

So it seems on this beautiful Taco Tuesday that Europe is far more advanced than America. And this makes sense. Europe's first spot. Bitcoin ETF lists in Amsterdam, London based Jacoby. I almost butchered that I almost did asset management listed Europe's first Bitcoin spot ETF on Euro. Next Amsterdam. Um Your own X is a pan entrepreneurial platform that provides trading post trade services for a range of financial instruments and the ETF is regulated by the Gurney Guernsey Financial Services Commission. The ticker is B coin which I'm sure we have some all coins somewhere. Name that um and the custody is for the fund is provided by Fidelity, which is a very interesting choice. And I feel like that is the big piece of the story here. And the trading firm flow traders is the market maker. The ETF was first approved almost two years ago but pushed back its plans due to market conditions and situations like the collapse of Tara and FTX. But I don't think the collapse of Tar and FTX happened until a year ago. So I wonder why it took them so long to launch. We were in the midst of a bull run. Um Jen, I'm gonna toss this to you for fun. Sure. Um And don't worry, I butchered the name this morning so that, so you were able to correct it for me. Um So I wanted to say that they got approval in 2021 and when they got that approval, they said they planned to list it in 2022. And then we had all of the events of 2022 that pushed to um the launch this year. So the story goes, the interesting part of this ETF for me is that there's this dec carbonized digital asset fund that goes along with it. This is compliant with article eight of the European Sustainable Finance Disclosure regulation. I'm not in Europe. So I have no idea what that means, but I think that's really interesting, right? We have this ETF that's launching in Europe. It's the first one in Europe and they're taking this like ESG narrative very um very much to heart. It feels almost like a blast from the past, but they're introducing it in a new way. So I am not going to try and describe what's going on. I will completely uh butcher it. But apparently this new offering is different from carbon offsets. Uh The ce said, whilst offsets can be used for any aspect of a company's carbon footprint. This one is particularly focused on electricity consumption. So that kind of goes hand in hand with Bitcoin with that information. I want to pass it to you will and ask you what you think about this environmental aspect of the ETF, do you think we're going to see more ef offer this? Could it appease regulators and get more institutional, uh, investors interested? Yeah, I think it does do that. Right. Because everyone wants to purchase Bitcoin, but there's a stigma associated with it and most people are just not interested in, like, delving into it, right. Like they read headlines or like Bitcoin has this environmental problem and that's as far as they're going to go into it, but they still want the exposure to Bitcoin. So here's a nice handoff, right? Like I can buy Bitcoin, I can get exposure to it and I don't have to feel bad about it because there's some sort of like a carbon cream carbon scheme associated with it. I think you're gonna see that more and more with these ETF products. Like this is the first one in Europe to be launched. We're going to see them in the US, hopefully this year and a lot of them do have some sort of like carbon scheme uh associated with them. It's been a lot of Bitcoin mining ones. There's been a lot of stuff with Bitcoin mining where they've added some sort of carbon scheme as well to be able to offset things. So in the event that an investor does purchase something, they don't feel too bad. About purchasing. Uh I think to Zach's point, we've talked about this on the show over the last two years. This is something that's just going to trail Bitcoin no matter what. Like it's always just going to be there. Zach, I think there's like also a fine distinction here around like ETPS, ETF Setns because like Europe has a lot of crypto etps and I think that ETF S are a subset of Etps. So I feel like some of this, this is like distinction without significant meaning, right? Like a lot of these European markets, especially in Switzerland have listed a lot of these etps over the last 34 or five years, right? Like even fairly obscure ones, right? Like a, like a polka dot ETP or a Carano ETP, right? So I think the European market to Wendy's original point is far more advanced as it relates to ETPS related to crypto assets than the US market. And I think it it always strikes me as so odd that, you know, seemingly well intentioned smart people in the regulatory class on opposite sides of the Atlantic can come to wildly different conclusions about whether or not they should support these products for their markets, right? So I think again, like the background here of course, is this wave of spot Bitcoin ETF applications in the US that are still languishing in like bureaucratic purgatory, right? And have been for years where in Europe we see again, further momentum, whether it's Etp ETF etn, again, that distinction, those distinctions a bit lost on me because I'm not a financial professional or planner. But you know that that is the subtext, right Europe, moving ahead, us languishing behind. And I think that is very much the story that's animating a lot of these um you know, more Wall Street friendly Bitcoin plays is like, OK, can we like advance the conversation? We've been having the same thing over and over again where the SEC just gets out the big like rejected stamp uh after dragging the process on for months and months and months. So I don't know, I'm just hoping that sometimes uh at some point this was break, but so far the SEC has held strong despite our insistence that they may reconsider things. But I got thoughts to Wendy for our last thoughts on this one, for sure, really quickly. Why are we associating digital assets with climate change? I feel like there's other factors and other ways that humans consume that are a lot more detrimental to the climate than a digital asset. That's all I think it's just the mining part, right? So energy intensive and there's no really way of getting around that. So I think that Sigma will always be there and you can financially engineer your way around it. Sometimes it works, it works for some investors. But for the most part like that, Sigma will always be there because there's an energy component for Bitcoin. You killed Wendy. Will you know what old man will? Is gonna be the man in front of his house yelling into the abyss, watering the yard and like like this zero temperature just yelling into the abyss, get off my yard when there's nobody there and he's in the middle of nowhere in some remote area, maybe in the desert. I don't know. That will be. Well, time will tell that's just how much you lost it. Will you just be watering the drudge? Um, ok, before we move on to the next story, I believe that all those trad ETF S that are on that beautiful graphic that our control room was just showing are up for a decision in September. But many, many people think that we're going to see another delay. So we will wait and see what happens in September with those ETF S.