Sberbank has listed the first issue of structured bonds on the exchange, linked to the dynamics of Bitcoin’s price in rubles.
In other words, this is not even an ETF: there is no need to buy Bitcoin or Bitcoin substitutes. You simply give money to the bank, and it pays you returns proportional to how Bitcoin would have performed if you had bought it with that amount.
At the same time, purchases can be made with a double linkage, so that the investment is indexed in dollars in order to avoid the effects of RUB/USD volatility.
Overall, it’s a win-win deal — unless you start asking philosophical questions about the reliability of such investments: the bank gets the opportunity to sell yield-generating “paper assets” without spending its own funds or dealing with the operational burden of acquiring real Bitcoin.
And investors get a convenient instrument for investing in Bitcoin without any extra effort — you put in the money and that’s it.
But, of course, there is a catch: everything is still available only to “super-qualified investors” within the Central Bank’s experimental framework. And for super-qualified investors, the difference is not so obvious: what exactly is the advantage compared to buying secondary-market ETFs versus these bonds?