Grayscale Investment’s mini version of its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) began trading on Wednesday soon after getting approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The spot Bitcoin exchange-traded product began trading at 4 a.m. ET on Wednesday after its registration statement became effective, according to a statement released by Grayscale. The SEC approved the 19b-4 form for the product last week.
“I think demand for very low-cost bitcoin exposure will find a lot of investor interest,” said Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, in an interview with The Block. “We’re a client-focused organization and are just trying to build products that give our clients the best possible access to crypto. So we will see how the first few trading days go.”
The trust, under the ticker symbol “BTC,” is intended to be a “spin-off” of GBTC, with new shares of the mini trust designed to be distributed to GBTC shareholders as GBTC contributes a certain amount of bitcoin to the trust, according to an S-1 filing posted in March. A similar spin-off was approved earlier on for Grayscale’s Ethereum product. Both the mini versions of the bitcoin and ether products trade on NYSE Arca.
“The timing of this product launch is excellent,” Pandl said. “There’s a great deal more mainstream attention on crypto today, partly because the Federal Reserve is about to cut rates, partly because of presidential election politics and the fact that the Trump policy platform may call for dollar weakness as a way to support domestic manufacturing. These are the kinds of macro trends that investors own bitcoin for.”
Assets like bitcoin compete with the dollar, with lower interest rates tending to be a negative for the U.S. dollar and a positive for assets like gold and bitcoin, Pandl explained. This comes as GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump said he plans to revamp domestic manufacturing by weakening the value of the U.S. dollar.
“We will see how this all plays out, but a sustained period of dollar weakness is exactly the type of scenario that, in my view, investors ought to be holding Bitcoin in their portfolio for,” Pandl said.
