Despite being delisted by cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S., XRP — the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger created by Ripple Labs — is now available on the Zurich-based SIX Swiss Exchange, Switzerland’s principal stock exchange and Europe’s third largest.
CoinShares, Europe’s largest digital asset investment firm, launched this month the CoinShares Physical XRP (Ticker: XRPL), an exchange traded product (ETP), according to the company’s announcement. An ETP, like an exchange-traded fund (ETF), is a financial instrument traded on a stock exchange, like company shares.
“The digital asset ecosystem is vast and still growing at breakneck speed. As we continue to diversify our product offering in 2021, we are focused on providing investment exposure to those assets and networks that resonate most with our European client base,” said CoinShare’s chief revenue officer Frank Spiteri, in a news release. “XRPL is CoinShares’ second product launch of Q2, and we’re looking forward to building on this momentum in the months ahead.”
ETPs allow investors to have exposure to a wide range of asset classes that can be difficult or costly to access directly, through the same brokers and platforms as shares. Each unit of XRPL is backed with 40 XRP at launch, with the XRP stored with Komainu, a regulated digital asset custodian. XRPL has a base fee of 1.50% per annum.
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Townsend Lansing, CoinShares’ head of product, told Forkast.News in an email that the company had launched the XRP ETP following “extensive client requests for such a product on our new institutional grade ETP platform.”
“We launched the world’s first ETN tracking XRP in 2019 (which recently expired). We feel that it is important that investors continue to have the ability to gain exposure to XRP given its status as a top five digital asset by market capitalization (CoinMarketCap 12 April 2021),” Lansing added.
The XRP ETP is CoinShares’ fourth ETP. CoinShares also has ETPs for Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC). The ETPs are available to eligible institutional and individual investors throughout Europe. CoinShares says it is working on a number of initiatives, including products and services related to decentralized finance (DeFi), to help its investors gain exposure to a wide range of digital assets.
The launch of the XRP ETP by CoinShares follows U.S. asset manager Grayscale’s liquidation of its Grayscale XRP Trust in January after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement action against Ripple and its assertion that XRP is a “security” under federal securities law. But despite the SEC lawsuit, Ripple has been pushing ahead to expand its payments business outside the U.S., particularly in Asia.
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“As a group policy, CoinShares does not comment on current litigation involving third parties,” said Townsend Lansing, CoinShares’ head of product, in a reply to Forkast.News’ query on whether the SEC lawsuit against Ripple Labs has any impact on the XRP ETP.
With the growing interest in cryptocurrencies, digital asset managers have been launching exchange-traded products for investors who want exposure to cryptocurrency without having to worry about digital wallets and private keys, custody or know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance. Earlier this week, three new Ether-based ETFs launched on Toronto’s stock exchange. And in the U.S., a growing list of ETF applications are awaiting the SEC’s approval.
Inflows into digital asset investment products totaled US$233 million last week, the largest inflows since early March, with over US$65 billion in assets under management, according to a digital asset fund flows report by CoinShares this week. The XRP exchange-traded product saw inflows of US$33 million, nearly doubling its assets under management.
CoinShares publicly listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in March. The company has over US$5 billion in assets under management.
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