There was plenty of buzz this Friday afternoon at the New York Stock Exchange. To celebrate its new Ethereum ETF, ETHW, Bitwise held a bell-ringing ceremony. Despite a fairly crowded field of new issuers, ETHW has been a standout, with staggering flows of nearly $250M in just 4 days.
iShares, Fidelity, VanEck, Franklin Templeton, Invesco, and 21 Shares were among the new issuers this week. However, ETHW cracked the top three and is now competing for second.
Part of the appeal of the new ETHW product is its unique fee structure and give-back model. ETHW has a net expense ratio of 0.20%, among the lowest in the field. Bitwise is also waiving the sponsor fee for the first $500 of Trust assets. In addition to this, Bitwise donates 10% of its profits to the Ethereum open-source project. The donation helps fund security, scalability, usability, and innovation of the platform. This is a unique piece of community giveback that we have not seen in other similar products.
Hong Kim, Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Bitwise, gave some remarks before the bell ringing ceremony. He likened Ethereum to “a shared dream of people who tend to it… Ethereum represents a shared public computer that allows us to exchange in a secure manner.” By creating the give-back model of 10% being donated back to the open-source project, Kim said, Bitwise is creating an “infinite garden” that can be cultivated in a decentralized and secure manner across the globe.
Continued Success at Bitwise
Bitwise’s Bitcoin ETF, BITB, was a massive success with $2.5B in inflows YTD. With the launch of ETHW, Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise, attributes their continued success to “investors that have been excited about access to Ethereum”. With the issuance of ETHW, Hunter went on to say that investors now “have access to that… along with one of the most competitively priced ETPs at 20-basis points.”
At the VettaFi Exchange conference in Miami back in February, Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise, predicted a better than 50% chance of a spot Ethereum ETF being approved this year. That has now happened; so the question now is what’s next? In speaking with Hunter, he says, “2024 has begun the crypto gold rush so we will see a lot of things next.” He went on to say that “nothing will quite compare to Bitcoin and Ethereum which are known widely and leaders… Bitwise is known for the Bitwise 10 crypto index fund (BITW), the largest crypto index fund in the world. And so, I think you’ll see strategies like that as well as additional assets being attempted in this chapter.”
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