WisdomTree: Company’s consumer app is a better way to hold BTC

Author: Ben Strack, Blockworks; Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

Although WisdomTree lags behind other fund issuers in Bitcoin ETF inflows, executives said that as more Financial advisors are allocated to such products and they expect an increase in inflows.

During an earnings call on Friday, Chief Operating Officer Jarrett Lilien emphasized that the company’s consumer app offers a better way to hold Bitcoin than ETFs.

At the end of 2023, WisdomTree had $100 billion in assets under management, a record for the company. But the U.S. Spot Bitcoin Fund, which the fund launched on Jan. 11 with nine rivals, has seen about $10 million in inflows in the first 15 trading days, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence.

The total inflow is the lowest of the nine U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs that have introduced the asset to date. That doesn’t include Grayscale Investments’ Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC), which had about $28 billion in assets when it converted to an ETF and has since seen more than $5 billion in outflows.

BlackRock and Fidelity led the way with fund inflows of about $3 billion and $2.5 billion, respectively, as of Thursday. Despite massive outflows from GBTC, net inflows into these 10 funds totaled approximately $1.5 billion.

“We are confident in our capabilities and our track record of growing assets under management,” Lilien said on the company’s earnings call on Friday. "That being said, this will take time, especially in our model, as these products are not yet available on many advisor platforms, where we expect the majority of our traffic to be."

This person The COO previously called the company's wealth management channel "the primary distribution channel for U.S. ETFs" in an email and noted that the company will work to educate partners on the asset class and new WisdomTree products.

Having addressed the slow growth of the company’s U.S. Bitcoin fund, Lilien believes Bitcoin has better use cases in WisdomTree’s consumer applications than in ETFs.

The asset manager launched the WisdomTree Prime app last year. It offers users a range of digital funds (records of stock ownership are kept on the Stellar or Ethereum blockchain) as well as USD and gold tokens, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).

WisdomTree aims to make the app, currently available to users in 38 U.S. states, available to everyone nationwide later this year, executives said Friday.

Lilien said: “Not only can you put Bitcoin alongside other digital assets, you can also get additional functionality that ETFs don’t have in the form of payments and peer-to-peer functionality.”