Wall Street Brokers Will Only Accept Spot ETFs for the Top Crypto Assets, Predicts Cathie Wood

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood believes wirehouses will only have interest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for top digital assets.

In a new interview with Peter McCormack at the Consensus 2024 crypto conference, Wood says that the large broker-dealers will likely embrace only a spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETF and an Ethereum (ETH) ETF.

To date, only Bitcoin ETFs have launched. But it now seems possible ETH ETFs could launch later this year. Crypto insiders believe ETFs for other crypto assets could soon follow.

“I don’t think the wirehouses will accept- there could be two, these two [BTC and ETH ETFs]. Maybe Solana. Maybe. But I don’t think that the wirehouse platforms will want to do more than the majors, just to give their clients exposure to this new asset class.

What I do think is, and we have some of these, that private funds are going to sift through the thousands out there and probably find 20 or 30, but you’re going to have to do a tremendous amount of due diligence because, as you say, there’s a lot of nonsense going on out there.”

Wood also says that since the approval of the spot BTC ETFs – ARK is among those that launched an ETF for Bitcoin – wirehouses are doing their due diligence on the crypto king and she believes they will start to offer the product to their clients.

“What has changed is we are now talking to the major platforms. We call them wirehouses. So, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, and they are in deep due diligence like, ‘Okay, what is this?’…

And while no major platform has yet put any of us, any of the spot Bitcoin ETFs on its platform yet, we think that’s coming. We can tell from the kinds of questions they’re asking.”

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