Australia’s largest stock exchange, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), has approved its first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), which will commence trading on June 20.
Investment firm VanEck will be the issuer of the spot Bitcoin ETF — the VanEck Bitcoin ETF (VBTC) — according to a VanEck press release shared with Cointelegraph. It comes only months after the firm was approved to start trading spot Bitcoin ETFs, the VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL), in the United States on Jan. 11.
CEO for VanEck in the Asia-Pacific region, Arian Neiron, reiterated that the demand is growing for Bitcoin exposure in Australia, especially through a “regulated, transparent and familiar investment vehicle.”
“We recognize Bitcoin is an emerging asset class that many advisers and investors want to access,” Neiron said.
“VBTC also makes bitcoin more accessible by managing all the back-end complexity. Understanding the technical aspects of acquiring, storing and securing digital assets is no longer necessary,” he added.
Although this is the first time a spot Bitcoin ETF has been approved by the ASX, there have been two other instances when Bitcoin ETFs have launched in Australia over the past two years.
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Recently, the Monochrome Bitcoin ETF (IBTC) was approved and started trading on Australia’s second-largest stock exchange, the Cboe Australia exchange.
The Monochrome Bitcoin ETF started trading when the markets opened on the Cboe Australia exchange on June 4.
Monochrome said IBTC’s holdings are stored offline in a device not connected to the internet and with a crypto custody solution that meets “Australian institutional custody regulatory standards.”
In April 2022, the Global X 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF (EBTC) became the very first Bitcoin ETF product to debut in Australia.
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