ProShares Launches First ETF to Short Bitcoin

ProShares, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider, recently announced a new product aimed at allowing investors to bet against Bitcoin (BTCUSD) – a first one of its kind. This represents a serious threat to the loyal crypto community and possibly caused yesterday’s Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk’s comments denying his hyping of crypto investments in the past.

BITI gives investors “an opportunity to potentially profit or to hedge their cryptocurrency holdings” should prices fall. BITI supposedly delivers the inverse of the performance of the S&P CME Bitcoin Futures Index, and it will obtain exposure through Bitcoin futures contracts.

Bitcoin ETFs that track the price of cryptocurrencies are popular in the U.S. because the SEC has been slow to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF product.

In October, the SEC finally approved the first Bitcoin futures ETF – another ProShares product.

The ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy ETF, slated to begin trading under BITI on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, June 21, provides an opportunity to profit if the price of the world’s biggest crypto currency declines.

From now on, investors can “conveniently obtain short exposure to Bitcoin through buying an ETF in a traditional brokerage account. Still, like the majority of other inverse ETFs, BITI is designed to only track the opposite of the underlying index over a single day, therefore investors who hold the fund for longer than one day may get returns worse than they expected, especially when volatility is heightened in the market.

The launch of the ETF comes at a time when Bitcoin – and the entire crypto market – has been experiencing some sort of a fatigue crisis. Proshare’s Bitcoin Strategy ETF BITO, which tracks normal Bitcoin futures performance, lost 66% of its value since its launch in November.