At a glance
- HANetf, the London-based asset management platform, has listed exchange-traded commodities that give sterling and euro investors bitcoin exposure while hedging swings in those currencies against the dollar, with HSBC supplying the currency hedge.
- What the wrapper removes is a second bet.
- HANetf is importing the feature from gold, where it already runs euro-, pound- and Swiss franc-hedged products, and where currency-hedged gold ETCs have become a $23 billion asset class—roughly 13% of the region's gold ETC market.
Bitcoin's dollar problem now has a European wrapper. HANetf, the London-based asset management platform, has listed exchange-traded commodities that give sterling and euro investors bitcoin exposure while hedging swings in those currencies against the dollar, with HSBC supplying the currency hedge. The Arrow Bitcoin GBP Hedged ETC (GBTC) trades on the London Stock Exchange, and its euro counterpart (EBTC) lists on Frankfurt's Xetra and Euronext Paris. In an emailed announcement Wednesday, HANetf called the products "the world's first currency-hedged crypto ETCs," a claim about the wrapper rather than the underlying coin.
What the wrapper removes is a second bet. Bitcoin is almost universally denominated in dollars, so a sterling or euro buyer of an unhedged product carries the asset and the currency together, and exchange-rate moves can erode the return that lands in the investor's account. HANetf says it is targeting investors who want long-term bitcoin exposure but are concerned about dollar weakness. The listing also reflects a regulatory split between Europe and the U.S.: because ETFs in the U.K. and EU must hold diversified baskets, single-asset exposure reaches European investors through ETCs.
HANetf is importing the feature from gold, where it already runs euro-, pound- and Swiss franc-hedged products, and where currency-hedged gold ETCs have become a $23 billion asset class—roughly 13% of the region's gold ETC market. That share is what makes the crypto listing legible, and it is also what keeps it unproven: gold ETC buyers have had time to decide whether paying to strip out the dollar is worth it, and crypto ETC buyers have not.
The hedge counterparty is HSBC, which has appeared in these pages for its tokenized-deposit work, including the live tokenized-deposit transfer it completed with Standard Chartered on Swift's ledger. Supplying the hedge puts a global bank's balance sheet inside a product built for ordinary brokerage accounts.
The announcement leaves out the arithmetic: no fee figure, no indication of what the hedge costs to maintain, and no initial asset target. For a product whose sales argument is the removal of one source of return variance, the price of that removal is the first number an allocator asks for, and the one that will decide whether the wrapper is worth owning over the unhedged alternative.
HANetf has been busy regardless; PWD's tracking shows two other fund launches from the firm since mid-August. Whether rival European issuers bolt hedged share classes onto their own bitcoin ETCs will say quickly how much of a differentiator the structure is. The fee schedules, when they appear, will show what HANetf believes removing the dollar exposure is worth.
Reported by the Crypto ETFs & funds desk from CoinDesk — Policy & Institutions. Published . Corrections