Battle Brewing Among 1st North American Ether ETFs
A price war has already erupted between Canada’s new ether ETFs.
A three-way battle is brewing in Canada as the first ether ETFs in North America begin trading today.
The Purpose Ether ETF (ETHH), Evolve’s Ether ETF (ETHR) and the CI Galaxy Ethereum ETF (ETHX) all got the green light from Canadian securities regulators to launch on the same day, leveling the playing field and giving each fund an opportunity to take the lead in this new category.
Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, a platform for running a wide variety of decentralized applications.
Pulling Out All The Stops
With no single ETF having the first-mover advantage in this space, the issuers of these funds are pulling out all the stops to attract investors and capture a crucial liquidity advantage.
Evolve and CI Galaxy have waived the management fees for ETHR and ETHX through April 20 and June 15, respectively. After that, the management fees will revert to 0.75% and 0.40%, respectively.
Both issuers are undercutting Purpose’s ETHH, which has a management fee of 1% and which has not indicated that it will waive the fee.
Evolve and CI Galaxy are particularly motivated to gain an edge as both issuers lagged Purpose in launching their bitcoin ETFs. Purpose’s one-day head start on Evolve resulted in the former taking an 87% market share in the Canadian bitcoin ETF space versus 7% for the latter.
First In North America
All three of the ether ETFs are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and may appeal to Canadian investors and foreign investors with access to international securities.
Multiple ether exchange-traded products have been available in Europe for years now, including the Sweden-listed Ether Tracker One and Ether Tracker Euro ETPs, which have been trading since 2017. But ETHH, ETHR and ETHX are the first ether ETFs available in North America.
Currently, there are no cryptocurrency ETFs trading on a U.S. exchange, though many investors have gravitated toward the unlisted Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE), which became publicly quoted on the OTC Markets in 2019. The trust, which acts more like a closed-end fund than an ETF, currently has around $7 billion in assets under management.
Email Sumit Roy at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @sumitroy2
