(Bloomberg) — Grayscale Investments LLC aims to launch a clone of the world's largest Bitcoin fund as billions flow from the product.
The asset manager presented plans for the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust, which would be physically backed by the cryptocurrency and trade under the ticker 'BTC', a filing showed on Tuesday.
If approved, the exchange-traded fund will be seeded with an unspecified percentage of the world's largest Bitcoin ETF, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), and existing GBTC shareholders will automatically have shares of GBTC and BTC without creating a taxable event, according to the filing.
Grayscale's BTC plans to land as investors continue to pull money from the $28 billion GBTC, which has posted outflows of more than $11 billion — the second largest among more than 3,400 ETFs listed on USA – so far this year. Investors have instead sent money to its cheaper rivals, most of which charge 0.3%, while GBTC charges 1.5% per year.
Fees for BTC have not yet been listed, but are expected to be lower than GBTC, according to a person familiar with the matter. ETF issuers State Street Global Advisors and Invesco Ltd have both released cheaper versions of some of their larger ETFs.
State Street introduced the $6.8 billion SPDR Gold MiniShares Trust (GLDM) in 2018 with a fee of 0.1%, undercutting the 0.4% expense ratio of the older, larger SPDR Gold (GLD). Invesco went a similar route with the 2020 launch of the $22.5 billion Invesco Nasdaq 100 ETF ( QQQM ), which charges 0.15% annually versus the 0.2% fee on the $251 billion Invesco QQQ Trust Series 1 ( QQQ ) .