Grayscale Investment’s Mini Bitcoin Trust

Grayscale Investment’s mini version of its Grayscale Bitcoin (GBTC) Trust began trading on Wednesday after receiving approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The spot Bitcoin exchange-traded product officially started at 4 a.m. ET following the effective registration statement, according to Grayscale’s statement. The SEC approved the 19b-4 form for this product last week.

Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, stated in an interview with The Block, “I think demand for very low-cost bitcoin exposure will find a lot of investor interest. We’re a client-focused organization and are just trying to build products that give our clients the best possible access to crypto. So we will see how the first few trading days go.”

The trust, trading under the ticker symbol “BTC,” serves as a “spin-off” of GBTC, with new shares of the mini trust being allocated to GBTC shareholders as GBTC contributes a certain amount of bitcoin to the trust. A similar spin-off received approval earlier for Grayscale’s Ethereum product. Both bitcoin and ether mini versions are trading on NYSE Arca.

Pandl remarked, “The timing of this product launch is excellent. There’s a great deal more mainstream attention on crypto today, partly because the Federal Reserve is about to cut rates, partly due to presidential election politics, and the possible impact of Trump’s policy on dollar weakness supporting domestic manufacturing. These are the macro trends for which investors own bitcoin.”

Assets like bitcoin vie with the dollar; lower interest rates generally negatively affect the U.S. dollar while positively impacting assets like gold and bitcoin, Pandl noted. This comes concurrent with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump indicating plans to enhance domestic manufacturing by weakening the U.S. dollar’s value.

“We will see how this all plays out, but a sustained period of dollar weakness is the kind of environment where I believe investors should hold Bitcoin in their portfolios,” added Pandl.