tbh i'm not super sharp on this. but i don't think overnight price changes are an issue. if it moves 50% during a trading session possibly. it's worth being clear that ETFs might not be the best vehicle if your interested in intra day trading (i mean even beyond the circuit breaker topic, the stock market is only open for a few hours a day and not open during the weekend!) so spot bitcoin is def better in such cases

the issuer could go out of business? but even in that case the ETF itself is a separate legal entity of its own and will either be managed by another issuer or be liquidated and ppl get their money back

it's tightly regulated (no lending of any sort is allowed) and audited so really not a FTX like situation. but ofc still good to allow ppl to publicly verify so one of the things bitwise does is publish our holding addresses https://twitter.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1757813223536103568 (we're the only US ETF to do this)

i think ppl are overly down on lightning when really it works pretty well in the custodial (enterprise?) use case. lightning imo is what will be the interoperability layer that bridges liquidity between hubs of different kinds. ecash (both cashu and fedmimints) are super super interesting and promising as the last mile payment solution for scale and privacy for the end user. it's much better than just custodial lightning alone since it's private, free, and instant.

not much impact on our business yet and definitely no questions from clients yet. i think we're still driving the sound money / digital gold narrative in terms of what wall street is trying to wrap its head around

we prob won't build our own custody solution b/c since stuff like bernie madoff, it's very much expected from tradfi investors that the fund issuer shouldn't be the custodian as well since there's more room for fraud in that setting. a huge firm like fidelity ppl are fine with sine they trust apriori but a new firm like bitwise if we said we did self custody then many prospective investors would raise eye brows

centralization with coinbase custody isn't great but it is also undeniable that they have the longest / best track record with the largest amount of bitcoin. we're definitely open minded tho. over the long term i think a onchain multisig collaborative custody type model where multiple institutional custodians would need to be compromised at once for the bitcoin to be lost would be ideal. there's challenges to navigate in that world tho since "who is the custodian?" type things become harder to answer regulatory wise etc.

it really changes a lot b/c i also just play a non-CEO cofounder role which means you just take on whatever needs the most attention. but maybe the more steady CTO responsibilities are being involved with management of the eng team and just following things like protocol developments (current softfork discussions are fascinating for example) and things happening in the ecosystem (nostr & ecash are my two favorite things at the moment).

still waiting for that call lol

from the ETF perspective, i'd love to figure out how to enable in-kind redemptions so that ppl can redeem without a tax event in a self-sovereign way when they are ready. there are gold ETFs that allow for this so it should theoretically be possible but the SEC is not allowing it at the moment. so more wood to chop there.

it wasn't b/c ppl really thought we'd runaway with the bitcoin or something like that (ultimately these are incredibly tightly regulated products, etc). but more so i pushed for it internally b/c i felt it was important for the ETFs as public vehicles getting a lot of attention to set the right example and demonstrate to the world that this isn't like gold where public transparency and secure custody are at odds. you can have both with bitcoin and that's a big deal. also post FTX i feel more strongly that we just need to keep moving norms this direction so that every honest actor by default has more transparency and as a result the bad actors are more easily identifiable

while we use the language of "donation" when we support devs i think in reality it's closer to a self-investment into making the asset itself stronger. many ppl think bitcoin just magically gets maintained but that's not true! idk like to me the better question is if you manage a large pool of bitcoin, and you take fees for doing so, then why would you not reinvest some of that into the underlying infrastructure?

working with the SEC?

jokes aside, there's a lot of plumbing issues to get right. for example APs (authorized participants) are the ones that create and redeem ETF shares directly from the ETF itself and each of the entities (for us for example it's entities like goldman, jane street etc) you need to establish separate bi-lateral legal agreements etc. it's just a lot. and that's just one category of service provider you need for these to function.

i do. not for everyone but for those who go down the rabbit hole or have a desire to be further self sovereign which fwiw can happen many years down the road after their first dabble into bitcoin via ETFs (or any other route for that matter). it is something investors ask for as well since a in-kind redemption would cause no tax event as well. a few gold ETFs have this feature too so it's possible. the SEC is not comfortable with this yet and this one feels like it might take a while to push them on this topic (but also we're not going anywhere! we worked at the bitcoin ETF application for 6 years with the SEC so we're not going anywhere and we'll continue to push)

copy pasting my answer from here: https://primal.net/e/note1e3zcfx5d2fmep258fp76km7stcfdhqyxdet9l7q4m2smkkc6uulsrdqmx6

notable features:

hmm. hard one. this isn't one that ppl necessarily disagree with but the second order effect that i think ppl aren't seeing is that bitcoin ETFs will do wonders in fighting the discrimination bitcoin has been receiving in the US financial system.

for example broker dealers (regulated by FINRA and SEC) aren't allowed to custody bitcoin or really touch it in any way. SAB 121 is also a weird accounting rule that has been put out specifically targeting bitcoin and requiring extra reserves to be kept 1:1 if you hold bitcoin in anyway. this isn't like bitcoin asking for any type of special treatment. we're just looking for it to be treated equally as to everything else. it's been a hard battle for the bitcoin industry to push for this but since the bitcoin ETF the tradfi banking lobby has been pushing the SEC to get rid of these arbitrary road blocks to offering bitcoin services. the days these things are blocking bitcoin's path is numbered.

i hope so! we're doing our part publishing our bitcoin holding addresses for BITB and pushing the conversation. at least the other ETFs couldn't claim that it's not possible.

not likely for now. the whole point is that the wrapper makes it easy for tradfi brokerages to handle it (making it a token would revert it to something hard to handle)

they aren't immune to governments seizing it EO 6102 style if they wanted to. but at the same time i think they make such actions much less likely and much harder politically since now millions of more ppl and entities of all types are invested in bitcoin and they would be outraged by such a thing. honestly i feel much better about the "government bans owning bitcoin" attack vector these days than a few years back.

BITB is lower in 20% lower in fees (20 bps vs. 25bps). 10% of profits donated to devs. publishes its bitcoin holding addresses. i'm biased but i think for the bitcoiner that really cares BITB is the better bitcoin ETF for both you and the ecosystem.

every market open day where we have inflows / outflows (an AP comes to the trust and asks to create shares or redeem shares). when money comes in we go out and buy bitcoin. when money leaves we go out and sell bitcoin (hasn't happened to us yet!)

i think most bitcoiners think about the tradfi investor as like a monolith. but in reality a self-directed retirement account retail investor, a family office, a financial advisor, an endowment are all very different beasts. even within just the category of financial advisors (which is our main target client and also just the largest pool of investing capital in the US—around $20T) there's a whole spectrum. like there's advisors in wirehouses (morgan stanley, UBS, etc) and then there's regional broker dealer advisors (LPL, raymond james, etc) then independents and they all have different things they can and can't do and different client preferences. learning and realizing all this was a big part of getting better at operating bitwise. every investible dollar has a different constraint and preference and to unlock that dollar to be investible for bitcoin we need to tackle it in different ways! (ETFs are beautiful b/c they are a good swiss army knife that can be used in almost every tradfi context imaginable)

yessir

good example is if you want 24/7 trading ability. you can only buy / sell bitcoin ETFs during stock market open hours.

yeah fair question. i'm currently exploring the multi institutional multisig custody model (have talked to the unchained folks about it for example). the tricky thing about this is that it's harder to answer questions like "who has control? who is the custodian?" in the regulatory sense etc. long term i think it's the right strongest security model but there's some ways to go for it to be well understood enough for it to be a practical solution for ETFs i think. that's my current thinking but trying to get sharper on it.

just on the note about coinbase. i get the frustration but it is also undeniable that they have the longest / best track record with the largest amount of bitcoin being custodied. they have a really strong security practice.

kind of surprising gold ETFs have been experiencing outflows since the bitcoin ETFs launched even though gold price is in ATHs. you can't be sure that gold -> bitcoin rotation is the primary cause but if true an interesting trend.

here's a nostr post (with NIP 05 verification from the bitwise domain): https://primal.net/e/note16cdzg0uvmmjz0fxef89lwa0hpvrn8wfdup8h23wsg7k63wz7h78qdkkslh

He’s him

right on

highly unlikely? we're in year 7 of running bitwise as a straightforward revenue generating business serving real people with real investing needs. no need to muddy that with a coin with no purpose

the 0 fee was up to 1B in assets and currently the AUM is around 1.8B so fr the 0.8B we are currently taking the fee. donation will happen annually (in Q1 each year after we close out the year end accounting). currently the three orgs we're committed to are opensats, brink, and HRF and they will be splitting the 10% of BITB profits equally

21 million?