The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has just seen the listing of its first bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund—"ETF" for short.

Issued by investment management firm VanEck, the new investment product is trading under the ticker symbol "VBTC."

It's not the first bitcoin ETF to launch in Australia, others have been available for some time on the smaller exchange Cboe Australia. But it is a first for the ASX, our largest stock exchange.

If international experience is anything to go by, the ASX's new bitcoin spot ETF is likely to draw significant interest and could be the first of many similar products. In January, American investment manager BlackRock launched a similar product in the US—"IBIT"—which has since grown to manage almost A$30 billion in assets.

As Australia braces for a possible flood of new mainstream cryptocurrency investment products, it is important to know more about how they work and what risks they might entail.

A basket of investments

ETFs are investment products that track the performance of an underlying asset. Like shares, they can be traded on a public stock exchange. But buying an ETF is like buying a basket of different investments, the contents of which can vary.

Bitcoin or gold ETFs, for example, track the price of just one commodity. But equity ETFs can track whole collections of stocks, combined in proportions that reflect a particular index.

It is important to understand the difference between "spot" ETFs which actually hold their underlying investments, and "futures" ETFs which invest in derivative securities to approximate the performance of their nominal investments.

For example, BlackRock's IBIT product is a spot ETF, because it invests in bitcoin directly. A different ETF—ProShares "BITO"—is a futures ETF, because it invests in bitcoin futures (contracts to buy or sell bitcoin at a future date) in a way that tracks the price of the underlying asset.

Bitcoin ETFs are gaining momentum because they allow traditional investors to access a popular asset class that is still largely unregulated. Unlike buying cryptocurrency directly, the transaction is mediated by a large ETF issuer and takes place through a regulated stock exchange.

But they also create new costs, including management fees that can significantly impact returns.

Nowhere near the size of the US market

In the US, the watershed moment for spot bitcoin ETFs came on January 10 this year, when the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved 11 of them.

These funds have since accumulated more than A$75 billion in combined assets under management, and BlackRock's IBIT—the most liquid (easiest to buy and sell)—regularly sees more than A$1 billion in trades in a day.

In comparison, existing Australian bitcoin ETFs are orders of magnitude smaller in scale. Global X's "EBTC," which has traded on Cboe Australia since 2022, manages just over A$100 million in assets and sees a mere fraction of the trade volume.

This means liquidity—the ease with which an asset can be bought, sold and converted to cash—is much higher in the US.

The contrast between the US and Australia on this front is driven in large part by the different degree of involvement by institutional investors. Ease of trade means big asset management funds around the world are more likely to trade in the US, further fueling total assets under management over there.

This institutional involvement in bitcoin markets has become substantial. Some 12.5% of the currency's 21 million coin supply cap is now held by just 90 institutional entities, including countries, publicly traded companies and ETFs.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.