Traders will soon have a new way to bet on bitcoin while Wall Street waits to see if the long-awaited spot bitcoin funds are approved by federal regulators. The Volatility Shares 2x Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITX) is set to launch on Tuesday. There are already several bitcoin futures funds on the market, including the $1 billion ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) , but BITX will be the first leveraged ETF in the space. “There’s a big audience that’s already out there for leveraged-type products, and to sort of marry that with the intrinsic interest that there is in all things crypto — that’s why we feel that there’s a pretty good audience out there for this,” said Chang Kim, chief operating officer of Volatility Shares. The launch comes shortly after BlackRock’s application for a spot bitcoin ETF has renewed interest in crypto funds. The Securities and Exchange Commission has long opposed a spot bitcoin fund, and is in a legal fight with Grayscale over a similar proposal, but several other firms quickly followed BlackRock with their own applications. The price of bitcoin has also gained steam since the BlackRock filing and was trading above $30,500 on Tuesday. BTC.CM= 1M mountain The price of bitcoin has climbed since BlackRock’s filing on June 15. Kim said the Volatility Shares fund and the proposed spot bitcoin ETF are “completely different products” with different use cases. BITX, which uses margin accounts to gain leverage, is designed to be a short-term trading vehicle, and the fund’s prospectus cautions that the promised two-times return is only applicable over one-day periods. Like many leveraged products, BITX is more expensive than traditional ETFs with a management fee of 1.85%. Volatility Shares is small ETF manager, and BTIX will be its first crypto related fund. Its biggest fund is the 2x Long VIX Futures ETF (UVIX) , which has just under $100 million in assets. “Though this is our first foray into bitcoin per se, we are very well versed in managing ETFs that invest in futures,” Kim said.
