Osprey Fund avails its Bitcoin Trust to retail investors via its OTC desk

Osprey Fund, a digital asset investing solutions provider, has started offering retail investors access to its Bitcoin Trust. A press release disclosed this news on February 16, noting that the Osprey Bitcoin Trust (OBTC) is now publicly tradeable via the firm’s over-the-counter (OTC) desk. Through this move, Osprey has granted all US investors access to the fund through traditional brokerage and IRA accounts.

According to the news release, OBTC aims to track the CMBI Bitcoin index. The trust hopes to achieve this by providing better access to digital assets by improving security and transparency while minimising costs.

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Explaining why Osprey decided to make its Bitcoin trust public, the firm’s CEO, Greg King, said,

As a fiduciary-minded organization, we believe bitcoin deserves a place in every investment portfolio, but at a reasonable price.

King added that Bitcoin has vast potential for long-term growth. Apart from this, he believes that the leading cryptocurrency offers investors portfolio diversification, seeing as it has a low correlation to equities.

By introducing OBTC in the market, King believes that Osprey would offer advisors and investors more value by expanding their access to BTC, seeing as OBTC is priced like an ETF instead of a hedge fund.

A cost-effective BTC fund

While the Osprey Bitcoin fund is designed in the same way as Grayscale’s GBTC, investing in OBTC would only attract a 0.49% annual fee. Compared to GBTC, which charges 2% annually, OBTC is purportedly the lowest-priced publicly-traded Bitcoin fund in the world. However, the fund charges an extra 0.3% for services such as crypto custody. Nonetheless, King noted that he does not expect the extra charges to remain applicable for a long time.

Per King, the company aims to reduce the extra costs over time as the volume of assets under management increases. He added that custody costs have been diminishing over time and as they continue to drop further, the company would direct savings to investors. At the moment, the Osprey fund has approximately £57.65 million in AUM.

According to the publication, OBTC is supported by a team of experts that started investing in BTC as early as 2013. Allegedly, these experts have launched more than 100 ETFs and ETNs since then. Apart from a team of experts, OBTC has the support of top-tier service providers, such as Fidelity Digital Assets as a custodian, Grant Thornton as an auditor, and Coin Metrics as an index provider.