Jersey-based CoinShares announced today that two Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) connected to the price of the Ethereum cryptocurrency can now be traded on Nasdaq.
Denominated in both Swedish Kronor and Euro, the ETNs are designed to track the price of Ethereum and are based on the average value of a select group of liquid Euro exchanges.
This comes as no surprise with other providers including XBT issuing similar ETNs for tracking Bitcoin last month and GABI, the first regulated BTC hedge fund combining the two entities to launch CoinShares who have crypto assets of around $300 million. These previous ETN’s were made available to investors through Hargreaves Lansdown.
Investing in cryptocurrencies have been notoriously difficult for everyday investors due to wallet, transaction and exchange complexities however with CoinShares historic NASDAQ announcement non tech-savvy investors will now have full access to the cryptocurrency market.
In the last 18 months at least fifteen cryptocurrency funds have launched and around five crypto-based investment products are currently pending review with regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere.
“Today is a historical moment for Ethereum and ether as an asset; and for the future of crypto-assets. It was a little over two years ago that the bitcoin ETNs began trading – offering investors exposure to bitcoin via an established exchange for the first time. Today, we are able to bring ether to the market and mark another major first. It is important to remember how far and how fast the space has matured in the less than 8 years since this revolution began,” says Ryan Radloff, Co-Principal at CoinShares.
We put some questions to CoinShares in a short interview:
What type of investors do you hope to attract with the ETH ETNs?
Product is for any investor who has qualified access to Nasdaq Stockholm.
Can you give us an estimated $ price of what you think Ethereum will trading at by 2018?
No price target right now – though we did a valuation model in our latest Ethereum research which may be helpful
Do you plan to trade on other exchanges such in currencies such as £ or $ ?
Cannot comment on future plans of that nature, apologies
What other cryptocurrencies do you have in mind? are you open to other ETNs with other currencies?
We delivered this product because the market had been requesting it since last year. We will follow market demand for future products as well.