Coinbase opens its crypto index fund to accredited U.S. investors

&gt; Investing in Coinbase Index Fund is the easiest way to get exposure to a broad range get of crypto assets. Much cheaper than 2 and 20% charged by most crypto hedge funds, and you get new assets automatically added to the fund as they become available on Coinbase. No rebalancing. [0]<p>From their actual site [1], the fees are 2% a year so barely better than those hedge funds and absolutely atrocious compared to normal index funds. You are effectively being charged 2% fees for them running some scripts every once in a while to re-balance the fund compared to stock market index funds which charge on average around 0.05%. To make matters even worse, their &quot;index&quot; comprises of only 4 coins! That&#x27;s hardly an index at all.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brian_armstrong&#x2F;status&#x2F;1006691490272194560?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2018%2F06%2F12%2Fcoinbase-opens-its-crypto-index-fund-to-accredited-u-s-investors%2F" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brian_armstrong&#x2F;status&#x2F;10066914902721945...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;am.coinbase.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;am.coinbase.com&#x2F;</a>

&quot;Coinbase&#x27;s trading volumes fell 78% from December to April&quot; [1]. Moreover, it appears trading volume fell for each of those months (on a month-to-month basis). If this trend doesn&#x27;t reverse, they may soon be in a desperate position.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;can-the-biggest-u-s-bitcoin-exchange-win-over-wall-street-1527418800" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;can-the-biggest-u-s-bitcoin-exc...</a>

Interesting to think that the private keys for these funds will most likely be split across several pieces of paper (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing</a>) and stored in geographically distributed safes.<p>That&#x27;s the only way I can think of doing it offline.<p>Combining the pieces of paper together to generate the key would need to be done via a signing ceremony. I think coinbase have a patent for this.

I can’t imagine a world where commerce moves from government backed cash to hundreds of different crypto currencies.<p>Even if &lt;pick your favorite&gt; wins, won’t the majority of these coins go to zero in the long run?<p>That’s a far different proposition than say the S&amp;P 500, where it’s expected that the majority of companies will be worth more 20 years from now than they are today.

I&#x27;m surprised they actually moved forward with this idea. From the time this index was announced and tracked on March 6th until the sales began the GDAX index has fallen by ~50% in a bit less than a few months.

What is an &quot;accredited investor&quot; anyway? And why does this index fund need to only be available to them?

The set of people who can dump $250k in crypto assets is a tiny subset of accredited investors, one would think

Sadly they&#x27;ve added crap like ETC which greatly reduces the appeal of investing in such an index.

Wake me when they have an ETF for the lay investor.

Coinbase is actually considering ETC enclusion is also a big news