More than two months after the launch of ten spot bitcoin ETFs, another one has joined the race.
Trading under the ticker DEFI, asset manager Hashdex’s Bitcoin Futures ETF – which had been trading as a futures-based fund on the New York Stock Exchange since 2022 – was renamed and converted into the Hashdex Bitcoin ETF and now operates as a spot bitcoin fund.
In a bit of twist versus the other spot bitcoin ETFs, Hashdex in a press release said DEFI can hold up to 5% of the fund’s assets in CME-traded bitcoin futures contracts.
The futures allocation will allow DEFI to better track bitcoin prices over time and provide a more predictable creation/redemption process, the company said. Such an approach is not new to ETFs and most S&P 500 ETFs use a similar strategy, the company added.
DEFI currently holds 5,500 bitcoins and a modest number of futures contracts, according to the fund’s information page. The expense ratio is 0.90%, less than that of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s (GBTC) 1.50%, but higher than the other nine spot products.
The Hashdex conversion comes over two months after the original ten spot bitcoin ETFs started trading on Jan 11. Excluding Grayscale’s GBTC (which entered the spot era with nearly $30 billion in AUM), BlackRock’s IBIT and Fidelity’s FBTC are leading the way in asset gathering, with each having more than $10 billion in assets under management. WisdomTree’s BTCW is the smallest of the entrants, with 1,126 bitcoins and just shy of $80 million in AUM.
