Money Pulse

Canada becomes the first country to allow trading in Bitcoins on its stock exchange.

The Canadian authorities on Friday authorised the launch of a Bitcoin fund on the Stock Market, thus giving investors greater access to the cryptocurrency.

The Ontario Securities Commission, which oversees the Toronto Stock Exchange, gave the green light for the launch of an index fund proposed by the Purpose Investments company.

The fund is scheduled to be quoted on the Toronto Stock Exchange from this week, under the acronym of BTCC, an OSC spokesman told French news agency AFP.

This will make it the first bitcoin fund to be traded on a stock exchange.

“This EFT [Exchange Traded Fund] will be the first in the world to invest directly in physically settled Bitcoin, not derivatives, allowing investors easy and efficient access to the emerging class of cryptocurrency without the associated risk of self-custody within a digital wallet,” Purpose Investments stated in a press release.

The Gemini Trust Company will be the sub-custodian of the Bitcoins, while Canada’s CIBC Mellon Global Securities Company will be the administrator of the fund.

Created anonymously and managed by a decentralized network, virtual currency is particularly volatile. None of the major central banks recognize Bitcoin as a full-fledged currency.

At its creation in 2009, Bitcoin was worth next to nothing, but this week its value shot up to over 45,000 dollars, buoyed by a massive investment of 1.5 billion dollars in the world’s first cryptocurrency by Tesla, which also has plans to accept it as a means of payment.