[tac0_]

I'm pretty bullish on crypto but the concept of a bitcoin ETF that's managed by Wall Street seems to go against the purpose of decentralised finance to begin with. Why do investors need to go through a middle man when they could just buy something like the crypto20 which is essentially the same thing but without the fees.

[wmf]

Maybe five years ago the argument of "it's sooo hard to buy Bitcoin" was true, but now it's just as easy to buy crypto as stocks through Robinhood. Yet the middle men like Fidelity still want these ETFs for the fees I guess.

[thekyle]

I think the ETFs would be more useful if they held the top 25 cryptos at market cap weights. That could be kinda a hassle to do individually.

[weasel_words]

Can you take your Bitcoin out of Robinhood? Of course not.

You do not actually own any Bitcoin at Robinhood.

There's the "middleman" in your scenario without a middleman...just a different kind of middleman.

[antonvs]

True, although an ETF purely in a single crypto seems exactly like what Robin Hood or Coinbase are doing but with extra, presumably non-free, steps.

[SnowProblem]

Supposedly this is coming: https://www.coindesk.com/robinhood-crypto-withdrawals-deposi...

[swiley]

It's still hard to get FDs for crypto because there's distributed credit.

[muttled]

I suppose it's the same reason you might buy an index fund of the S&P 500 rather than buying equal portions of 500 companies and rebalancing them constantly. On top of the tedium, I'm not aware of any tax-advantaged account such as a Roth IRA that would allow you to re-balance your crypto holdings without triggering taxable events each time you re-balance.