In recent years, there has been a major debate among the investment community on the difference between active and passive management. Inactive asset management, investors spend their time buying and selling financial securities while in passive management, they buy indices and ETFs. As a result of this debate, the ETF market has continued to grow. In 2017, inflows to ETFs rose by almost $500 billion. This year, the number will potentially increase as the risks in the market increase. Total assets in ETFs have risen to more than $4.5 trillion.

An Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) is made up of two parts. The Fund part means that there is a combination of financial securities. The Exchange Traded part means that these funds are publicly traded. There are ETFs of all sectors including commodities, currencies, and stocks. With an ETF, you buy a group of securities all at once.

In recent years, there have been a desire to create an ETF for the cryptocurrencies market. It all started with a company known as VanEck. This is one of the biggest providers of ETFs. It has more than $48 billion in assets. In 2015, it proposed an ETF for the crypto industry. When it submitted it to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it was rejected. The SEC argued that the cryptocurrencies industry was very volatile, opaque, and would expose investors to risks.

To solve the issues cited by the SEC, the company went back to the drawing board. This year, it went before the SEC and presented the new version of its proposal. As it did this, eight other firms submitted their proposals. After looking at these proposals, the SEC rejected them. A few days later, the SEC announced that its senior managers would revisit the issue.

This week, VanEck met with the SEC to discuss about the issue. The latest proposal will have a few ways to protect investors. First, it will be targeted towards institutional investors. To do this, the ETF will have a starting price of $200,000. Second, it will be listed at a major exchange, the CBOE.