Despite cautions and hesitations among regulators about investing in virtual currency, the Winklevoss twins are inching closer to creating the first publicly traded bitcoin fund.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the brothers most widely known for their legal battles with Facebook's co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, disclosed in a regulatory filing that they had chosen to list their bitcoin exchange-traded fund, the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust, on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
The move comes one day after the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a warning to investors about bitcoin, saying that it created new “concerns” for investors.
Federal agencies have been scrambling to figure out how to regulate bitcoin since the collapse this year of Mt Gox, one of the most prominent exchanges for buying and selling the virtual currency.
“A new product, technology, or innovation - such as bitcoin - has the potential to give rise both to frauds and high-risk investment opportunities,” the SEC said in an alert posted to its website.
“The fact that the SEC has allowed the S-1 to progress this far is an indication that it may actually happen,” said Gil Luria, an analyst with Wedbush Securities who has studied bitcoin, referring to the SEC regulatory filing.
The Winklevoss brothers, who have emerged as two (or perhaps one) of the most public faces of bitcoin, first applied to create the exchange-traded fund last summer. The goal is to provide investors of any size with an easy way to bet on the future price of bitcoin, the volatile virtual currency that has gained momentum over the past several years.
They have invested in bitcoin companies, including the exchange BitInstant, and at one point owned more than $64 million of virtual currency itself. In February, the twins started the Winkdex, their own index to measure the price of Bitcoin, to work in conjunction with their proposed Bitcoin ETF.
NYT
