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Key takeaways

Investors throughout history search for ways to invest at the early stages of new businesses, ideas and investment opportunities. We believe that new blockchain and smart contract-based technologies, and the protocol-based networks they enable, might represent a significant new business opportunity that has the potential to change existing business models and revamp how investors think about and hold their assets. These innovations originated from the introduction of bitcoin, the first digital currency and the platform that introduced blockchain technologies to the world.

“Web3” business models that have emerged since bitcoin’s innovation are paving the way to a new type of network economy and approach to commercial transactions, creating a protocol-based economy that encourages democratized ownership and rewards participa­tion. This compares to today’s “Web2” platform-based economy where companies, not participants, own and control both the networks and the data they generate, centrally retaining the benefits being generated by those individuals and enterprises that drive the platform’s network effects.

The protocol-based economy that is beginning to emerge has new ways of creating, programming and building applications. The composability of this approach is allowing for new types of interoperability that might allow all asset owners to do more and obtain more liquidity and benefit from their holdings. Over time, we believe that these protocol- based networks will gain market share and that public blockchains might become global utilities that participants all over the world use to facilitate trade and engagement.

Because of its dominance and the tendency of other coins in the space to follow the performance of bitcoin, adding bitcoin to a traditional portfolio can provide exposure to the innovation and future potential of the entire ecosystem and allow an investor to benefit from partnerships forged with digital asset innovators from the protocol-economy with traditional companies or governments.

This paper will explore the investment thesis that we see supporting an allocation to bitcoin as well as model the asset’s performance quantitatively to help investors understand how including bitcoin in a portfolio may affect their investments, looking at the correlations, volatility, performance and risk-adjusted excess returns available historically from the asset. It will also lay out the benefits and potential risks of using the newly introduced spot bitcoin ETF products.

This paper covers:

  • The case for bitcoin
  • Bitcoin’s value proposition in a “modern” portfolio
  • Using spot bitcoin ETFs as an access vehicle


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