Friday’s VettaFi Crypto Symposium had much to discuss, with the launch of 11 different spot bitcoin ETFs this week. The news has focused markets’ attention once more on the many uses and potential of crypto investing, with the ETF wrapper potentially increasing access to the flagship cryptocurrency to more investors than ever before.
Kicking off the symposium, WisdomTree Investments CEO Jonathan Steinberg and Bitwise Asset Management CIO Matt Hougan gave an overview of how investors may want to interpret the news. The segment, titled “The Crypto Revolution: Understanding Crypto’s New Place in the Market,” saw VettaFi Vice Chairman Tom Lydon moderate a conversation between the two. Per Hougan, the starting point to understand the news focuses squarely on access.
“It means that financial advisors can now access bitcoin in the package that they have always wanted to, in an ETF,” he said. “An ETF lowers costs, provides peace of mind, and fits in the systems that advisors use to allocate on behalf of clients.”
For Steinberg, the news now puts the onus on advisors to study up and familiarize themselves with crypto and bitcoin. With access so much easier via the new spot bitcoin ETFs, advisors have to actively avoid it rather than point to the hurdles required to invest.
“From my perspective, it becomes for an advisor a very active decision to not include crypto, or bitcoin, in your portfolio at all,” he said. “So sort of a 1%-3% allocation, I would think, would become quite common, particularly because of the performance of the asset class.”
“It’s absolutely a game-changer,” Steinberg added. “Listen, ETFs have conquered every liquid asset class that they’ve touched. And I expect that this will be the case as well.”