Not many people know this, but a crypto ETF has also landed on European stock exchanges for some time now, called VanEck Crypto and Blockchain Innovators UCITS ETF, whose performance is significantly detached from the crypto markets.
This is an ETF that does not replicate the price trend of a cryptocurrency, but supports companies around the world that use blockchain to transform finance and other sectors.
Summary
The VanEck Crypto and Blockchain Innovators ETF on the stock exchange
This ETF is available on as many as four different European exchanges: London Stock Exchange (LSE), Deutsche Börse Xetra, the Zurich SIX exchange, and the Italian exchange in Milan.
It is present with the ticker DAGB on all four exchanges, but the one where it develops the highest volumes is the London exchange, particularly the trading pair in pounds.
This is an ETF that has as its underlying an index, MVIS Global Digital Assets Equity (MVDAPP).
This index tracks the performance of the largest and most liquid companies in the digital assets sector.
It is a market capitalization-weighted index modified and includes only companies that generate at least 50% of their revenue from digital asset services and products, such as exchanges, payment gateways, mining operators, software services, equipment, technologies, and digital asset infrastructures.
Among the companies included in the index are, for example, MicroStrategy and Coinbase, but in reality, the index covers at least 90% of the investable universe in this sector.
Precisely for this reason, it is an index whose volatility is not as high as that of individual cryptocurrencies, and single-asset ETFs that replicate their price.
The trend of DAGB on the stock market
Taking as a reference the price in dollars on the London Stock Exchange of the VanEck Crypto and Blockchain Innovators UCITS ETF, it is discovered that a disappointing 2022 was not followed by an equally brilliant 2023.
The ETF landed on the London Stock Exchange in mid-2021, during a full bullrun, at an initial price of around $19. At that time, the price of a Bitcoin was around $58,000.
During the course of 2021, thanks to the continuation of the speculative bubble until November, DAGB rose to over $23, which still remains the all-time high.
Already at the end of November, however, it had returned to the starting price, and starting from December a long bear-market began, ending only in December of the following year at a level of 1.8$. At that point, from the highs, it had lost as much as 92%.
It is worth noting that Bitcoin in the same period had lost less than 75% from the highs, therefore in bear-market DAGB performed much worse than BTC.
During the course of 2023, however, it had recovered a bit, reaching up to almost $9 by the end of the year. At that point, it was about -60% from the highs, while Bitcoin had returned to -40% from the highs. Therefore, the recovery of DAGB in 2023 was not greater than that of Bitcoin.
The 2024
The problem was 2024.
The price of Bitcoin started the year at around $45,000, and now it has risen to $70,000.
Ethereum has also performed well, with its price rising from $2,300 to $3,800.
Instead, the current price of DAGB is $7.2, which is less than the annual peak of 2023.
The main problem occurred in January, when it dropped below $5 while the crypto market experienced a slight correction.
Furthermore, while in February and March the crypto market performed very well, DAGB barely managed to briefly return to $8.5.
So in 2021 the VanEck Crypto and Blockchain Innovators ETF performed very well in the stock market, but in 2022 it performed very poorly, even worse than BTC and ETH.
In 2023 it had recovered a bit, although not more than Bitcoin and Ethereum, while in 2024 it actually did not grow.
It is possible that single-asset crypto ETFs have diverted attention from traditional markets to this index-based ETF, in addition to the fact that precisely thanks to Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs, it is possible that the markets have preferred the latter to crypto companies.
As long as it was not possible to take a position directly on the price of Bitcoin on the US stock exchanges, investors chose to take a position on companies considered “proxy”, such as MicroStrategy or Coinbase, but starting from January 2024 it has also become impossible on the US stock exchanges to take a position directly on the trend of the price of BTC thanks to the new ETFs.
Here, therefore, products created years ago, when the market was different, like the needs of investors, in this 202 are losing a bit of appeal.
