In established finance circles, cryptocurrency is heavily criticized. Less so these days, and as a crypto reporter, one of the clearest evidence of the digital asset industry’s mainstreaming came last week at the annual Exchange ETF Conference, which was sponsored by the world’s largest money managers.
Crypto didn’t just sit at the so-called adult table of investment; it was the featured guest. It also says eloquently about the industry’s progress, which has undergone its fair share of ups and downs since the recent regulatory approval of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs, which now provide retail investors with exposure to the world’s largest digital asset.
The conference, which has been conducted yearly for the past decade, is sponsored by ETF providers such as State Street, Vanguard, Invesco, and BlackRock. Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, are pooled assets purchased and sold through a brokerage firm and traded on exchanges. They provide investors with access to a wide range of asset classes at a cheap cost and minimal risk.
Financial advisers from all over the world gather to Miami Beach’s opulent Fontainebleau Hotel to meet with the smartest and brightest brains influencing the future of the $7.3 trillion ETF industry.
Yes, there is normally a lot of insider ETF baseball, but the bitcoin fund has been dominating the news with its approval by crypto skeptic Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, as well as a significant aid from Wall Street titans like BlackRock’s Larry Fink. When Larry Fink speaks, people listen. He once described Bitcoin as a “index of money laundering.” Now he refers to it as a “store of value.” Gensler is no match for the “king of Wall Street,” as Fink is called, because BlackRock is the world’s largest money manager, managing around $10 trillion in assets.
“Financial advisers who have been coming to this conference for nearly a decade told me the crypto crowd unequivocally brought the buzz this year,” said Mark Connors, director of research at Toronto investment firm 3iQ Corp.
Proof of this: the panel on spot bitcoin ETFs was the most well-attended of the entire conference, to the point where the staff ran out of the headphones provided to guests to listen to the presenters. There was barely a seat left vacant when executives from crypto asset managers Grayscale, Bitwise, and Galaxy addressed the stage to discuss their successful ETF launches.
