3iQ Corp, a Canadian investment fund manager, announced on Thursday the listing of a fund tied with Bitcoin on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Dubbed the Bitcoin Fund, this has become the first such fund to make a debut on a Canadian stock exchange.
As described by the company, it is a rules-based index intended to give investors a means of tracking the performance of Bitcoin on selected top tier exchanges, which include Binance, Bitflyer, Bitstamp, Coinbase, Gemini, itBit, and Kraken.
The fund is closed-end in nature, and the company has already completed the initial public offering of its units. It listed almost 1.5 million Class A units of QBTC.U shares, representing $14 million in asset value.
Multiple stakeholders
3iQ also partnered with asset manager VanEck to develop a Bitcoin benchmark in partnership with VanEck’s MV Index Solutions, a regulated index provider in developing cryptocurrency indices and data series.
Commenting on the newly launched fund, Thomas Kettner, Managing Director at MV Index Solutions, said: “We are pleased that our Digital Assets Indices continue to be popular and that we are now also the underlying index of a publicly listed investment fund in Canada. This will help to strengthen the status of digital assets as an asset class.”
The Canadian investment manager already manages two private investment funds – 3iQ Bitcoin Trust and the 3iQ Global Cryptoasset Fund – which started as a private placement available only to accredited and institutional investors in Canada.
For the new exchange-listed fund, 3iQ also tapped New York-based crypto exchange Gemini Trust to fulfill the functions of the custodian of the bitcoins held in the fund.
“We are delighted to see our Institutional Bitcoin Index used as the underlying index for The Bitcoin Fund. We believe that our robust Digital Asset Indices will continue to service the growing demand for regulated digital asset investment products,” Quynh Tran-Thanh, chief product officer at CryptoCompare, added.
