Meet The 29 Year Old Woman Teaming Up With Cathie Wood To Launch A Bitcoin ETF In The US

A 29 year old crypto “expert” that already manages $2.5 billion is coming to an ARK near you.

Ophelia Snyder, whose firm 21Shares manages $2.5 billion from her office in Switzerland’s “Crypto Valley”, is teaming up with ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood to try and launch a bitcoin ETF in the United States, according to Bloomberg. 

She has already opened an office in New York, where crypto-friendly Mayor Eric Adams has publicly proclaimed his support for the asset class. She’s now going to be tasked with the difficult proposition of getting regulators to look favorably upon the idea of a bitcoin ETF. It’s an idea the SEC hasn’t seemed to warm up to just yet. 

But that hasn’t stopped her. She told Bloomberg: “We really want to make people feel confident when they enter the space. That’s the whole game for us — lowering the barriers to entry and making people feel excited about what we feel is revolutionary technology.”

Wood and Snyder first met at a conference, the report says, where they “bonded over their mutual interest in crypto”. Now, Wood sits on the board of Amun, another of Snyder’s crypto-related companies. 

Todd Rosenbluth, head of ETF and mutual fund research at CFRA Research, told Bloomberg that risks of these ETFs “are elevated relative to traditional equity or fixed income products, so it’s easy to see how investors could lose money faster.”

Snyder’s current company tries to minimize risk of crypto “by purchasing the actual coins that underlie its funds and storing them in an offline wallet, known as cold storage”, the report says. While this adds to fees, it adds a layer of security. However, it doesn’t do much to protect investors from the volatile swings in crypto pricing. 

She has also been a critic of bitcoin futures ETFs: “The futures products are much more financially complex outside of the Bitcoin exposure. My worst nightmare is people start buying these products not understanding these nuances.”

21Shares charges between 1.49% and 2.5%. 

Snyder has “an enormous amount” of her own money in crypto, Bloomberg writes. 

She concluded about the asset class: “This is my life. This is the thing I think is going to change the entire world.”