UPDATED 04:45 EDT / JANUARY 23 2017

EMERGING TECH

Bitcoin Investment Trust files for initial public offering

Barry Silbert‘s Bitcoin Investment Trust is heading to Wall Street, filing initial public offering paperwork with the New York Stock Exchange for Grayscale Investments LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Digital Currency Group Inc.

KCG Holdings Inc. and Wedbush Securities Inc. are listed as possibly underwriting the IPO, with The Bank of New York Mellon acting as the transfer agent and the administrator of the Trust, along with Xapo Inc. listed as the custodian of the trust.

The offering is seeking to raise $500 million with an investment objective that the registered shares will reflect the performance of the value of bitcoin, before liabilities and expenses of the trust, as represented by the TradeBlock XBX Index.

According to the SEC filing:

“The Shares are designed to provide investors with a cost-effective and convenient way to invest in bitcoin. Because the value of the Shares is tied to the value of the bitcoins held by the Trust, it is important to first understand the investment attributes of, and the market for, bitcoins. Investing in the Shares does not insulate the investor from certain risks, including price volatility.”

The Bitcoin Investment Trust was launched in 2013 as an unmanaged private investment vehicle that solely tracks the underlying price of bitcoin. Silbert was founder and chief executive of SecondMarket Inc., a marketplace for trading shares of private companies, until mid-2014. The firm became NASDAQ Private Market after it was acquired in late 2015 by NASDAQ in a joint venture with SharesPost.

Listing of the trust is said to be a test for higher-risk investments going public, with The Australian reporting that it could prove to be an early test for how a Securities and Exchange Commission run by an appointee of new U.S. President Donald Trump will greet innovations that may raise investor protection or other market structure issues.

The trust itself has been previously traded on the Over the Counter board, but the new public company would operate as a traditional exchange-traded fund, giving the trust not only more funds to operate but also liquidity in terms of its ability to be openly and easily tradable.

As of Sept. 30, the Bitcoin Investment Trust had a net asset value of $102,639,992 equating to $56.94 per share, with bitcoin holdings as of the same date totaling $102,767,265. That last figure may be considerably higher now given the boom in the price of bitcoin in the last quarter of 2016, which has since cooled.

Image credit: Pixabay/Public Domain CC0

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