GSR has launched its first ETF on Nasdaq. Known as a long-standing market maker in the cryptocurrency market, the company is entering the investment products space with this fund, named GSR Crypto Core3. The fund will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "BESO" and will invest simultaneously in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.
The difference from classic spot ETFs is that Core3 will offer a share not only of price fluctuations but also of staking returns for eligible assets. Investors can earn passive income while waiting for their assets to appreciate in value. The fund is actively managed and rebalanced weekly. The management fee is 1% annually.
GSR claims that Core3 is the first actively managed multi-asset ETF in the US to offer staking access. They may be right in this claim, as the SEC has long been wary of staking mechanisms and multi-asset structures. This was partly due to regulatory uncertainty and partly due to a lack of clarity on how such complex structures should be assessed in terms of investor protection. Until spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs were approved in 2024, the path was effectively closed for such products. Core3 will be one of the products to test whether the regulatory environment has truly changed.
Since then, the sector has changed rapidly. Spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted billions of dollars in inflows shortly after their approval. BlackRock's Bitcoin and Ethereum funds became the most prominent examples in the category in terms of both trading volume and size. Grayscale and Hashdex also launched products covering multiple digital assets. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs became more visible in the crypto ETF space. A new ecosystem has emerged. But regulatory hesitancy towards multi-asset strategies has not completely disappeared; this area is still partly ambiguous.
GSR's growth efforts
On the GSR front, this step is part of the direction the company has recently taken. Known for many years only for its market making, GSR is now expanding into asset management and token advisory. In March, it acquired Autonomous and Architech; both companies operate in the token advisory field. In addition, by investing in Libeara, a tokenization platform backed by SC Ventures, it has positioned itself in the field of digitizing real-world assets. Core3 fits into this picture; a model where liquidity and pricing information gained from market making are transferred to asset management. Andy Baehr, responsible for the product, says Core3 is designed to answer three practical questions: what to invest in, how to generate returns while holding, and how to position oneself against market fluctuations. CEO Xin Song puts the approach in a broader context; he states that the ETF strategy is built on a deep understanding of the evolution of the crypto asset class.
