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Crypto bet:
Melanion Capital launches a Ucits-regulated Bitcoin fund
Photo: Dado Ruvic / REUTERS
As far as is known, the French investment house Melanion Capital has created a fund that is supposed to track the price of Bitcoin and that at the same time meets the high regulatory standard "Ucits" of the European Union (EU).
As the "Financial Times" reports, Melanion has already received the necessary approval for the fund from the French authorities.
The fund will track the share prices of up to 30 companies in areas such as cryptomining or blockchain technology, the report said.
With this, Paris-based Melanion Capital wants to achieve a 90 percent correlation between the fund's development and the price of Bitcoin.
Background: There are already a number of certificates and other securities with which investors in Europe can bet on Bitcoin. However, these do not bear the "Ucits" seal of the EU. "Ucits" (or: "Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities") is the gold standard of fund regulation in the European financial world. Most of the investment funds sold across Europe have this standard, which offers investors a high level of protection for their investments. Their units are considered to be special assets that creditors of the fund company are not allowed to access directly in the event of bankruptcy. There are also tax advantages.
According to "FT", one problem is that supervisory authorities are of the opinion that the "Ucits" rules, which are already a few years old, would exclude such funds from directly investing in cryptocurrencies.
Melanion apparently bypasses this obstacle by investing in stocks that are related to Bitcoin.
A corresponding share index for the fund is calculated by the German fintech Bita for Melanion.
According to the "FT", the papers in the fund include, for example, the crypto miners Argo Blockchain and Riot Blockchain as well as the investment company Galaxy Digital of the investment
entrepreneur Mike Novogratz
(read our exclusive interview with Novogratz: The lessons of the Bitcoin billionaire).
According to the "FT", the Melanion Fund also shows how creative investment houses are now to make Bitcoin investments accessible to a broader public, even against the skepticism of regulators.
In the USA, for example, a number of investment firms are already pushing for such products to be launched on the market - but the US Securities and Exchange Commission has not yet approved a single Bitcoin ETF.
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