Expert's Take: Is a Bitcoin ETF Really Possible? with James Seyffart

Yeah, yeah, let's be I'll be very blunt. If you look at all the things that they have said and written over the last three years, this will be denied.

But really there's a lot there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests that um it will be approved. The th it goes back to what I said. They can back into whatever decision they want to.

Um

Okay, well you said two things there, uh James. I want to be clear.

When Bitcoin ETF? That is the question on our mind today. Is the Bitcoin ETF actually happening or not? Will it happen this year?

Or not? BlackRock, Fidelity, some of the largest ETF issuers in the world have now submitted filings for ETFs with the SEC. Is Gary Gensler going to let them through?

And at this point, can he even say no?

That's the question we raise with James Seyford. He's a Bloomberg analyst who's tracking this thing closer than anyone I've ever met. He's on the episode today, and he gives us a date by which we should have a clean answer from the SEC on the Bitcoin ETF. So is he over or under on the probability of the SEC approving a Bitcoin ETF this year? You have to listen to the entire conversation to find out. I am psyched about this episode. And before we begin, I want to address a question that some of you might have, which is why is bankless even covering the Bitcoin ETF? That's not very bankless of you, you might say. I disagree with that.

And here's why.

I think when people buy crypto assets, they buy into crypto values. Not all the way, not all at once, but a little bit at a time. This is just another step forward. Crypto ETFs, in my mind, are a gateway drug, a type of gateway drug. I don't think people will stop with just the Bitcoin ETF and their retirement account. I think that's the gateway to them setting up an exchange account, for instance, and buying spot Bitcoin or Spot Ether that way, which is the gateway to going full bankless and taking custody of their own keys. In order for people to care about crypto, they actually have to own crypto. And this is an easy way for people to own crypto in their retirement accounts. When we get more crypto ownership, we get more economic security.

And we get more people who care about crypto issues in their respective jurisdictions. We need a lot more people to care about crypto in the United States in order to turn the regulatory tide. There's one other thing I think we get from this episode, which is learning more about traditional finance. How is crypto supposed to eat traditional finance and disrupt it if we don't even understand how it works? Like, do you understand how ETFs work today? What backs them? Why people love them? Why they're popular? I didn't. And that's where we start this episode with James. This is a college-level course on ETFs, from their birth in the early 90s to the Bitcoin spot ETF and the possibility of that today. I'm doing this episode solo today. David is off climbing mountains, but he'll be back soon. And uh he'll certainly be back in time for an event that you should pay attention to. It's called Permissionless. This is the crypto conference to go to in 2023. If you only pick one, and I think you should pick one, the bear market conferences are the best conferences. You gotta come with David, myself, the rest of the bankless nation to permissionless. It's happening in Austin, Texas, September 11th through the 13th. So that's Texas, Austin, September 11th through the 13th. And we have an absolutely stacked agenda. We've got Eric Voorhees who's talking. We've got Hester Pierce from the SEC Commission. We've got Stani from Ave. Go click the link in the show notes, get a ticket, and come with us to Permissionless this year. All right, guys, it's time to go find out about this Bitcoin ETF. We'll be right back with James. But before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless Nation, the question on our mind today is a Bitcoin ETF happening?

We have an expert who can weigh in on this. James Seifert is a research analyst at Bloomberg. He's got one foot in crypto and the other foot in ETFs. He's currently a Bloomberg intelligence ETF analyst, and he's here to drop some insight on the question I just opened with when are we going to get that Bitcoin ETF? James, welcome to Bankless.

Thanks for having me, Ryan. Happy to be here.

You know, uh, we talk a lot about crypto in uh on bankless, of course. And so I think it's and some people, some listeners, they um got their first exposure to finance by way of crypto. Actually, my my co-host David Hoffman is very much like this. So I don't know if David's ever purchased an ETF in his life. And I think there's probably some bankless listeners that uh fall into that camp too. So could we start by going through some of the basics? What is an ETF? I think I know the acronym. Does that stand for exchange traded fund? Is that correct, correct? And what is this thing that we're talking about today?

That is 100% correct. Um, so it's exchange traded fund. It's basically people, a lot of people have 401ks, 403Bs, these types of plans, at least in the US. And usually what you're investing in is a mutual fund. Um, and those have much longer tickers with an X at the end, typically. But essentially, um what that means is those funds are not traded. So you give money and at the end of the day, they put that money to work the next day for when your money comes in. And for mutual funds, for 401ks and plans like that, it makes complete sense. It's easy. You're not usually super time commitment because you're just contributing on a regular basis. But an ETF is a traded vehicle. And basically the real story here is that the ETFs were invented after the SEC wrote a report in 1987. There was this big crash. Um, a lot of it had to do with futures and derivatives. And the SEC said basically they wish they had something that was more physically backed rather than derivatives or derivative of different assets. Um, and basically, this this guy, Nate Most, came up with the idea for what is now um an ETF. And it it comes off the idea of these things called commodity warehouse receipts. They've those have been around forever. And the idea of commodity warehouse receipts, if you think about it this way, is like say you had a bunch of gold or a bunch of barrels of oil or uh whatever wheat, corn, you name it, right? And one thing that you used to be able to do is you would store that somewhere, and then the warehouse would

Charge some sort of fee, and in return, they give you pieces of paper that say you have this much exposure, or it was a vault or gold. You would say you have this much gold. And you and rather than moving that physical gold, those physical commodities around, you trade those pieces of paper. So those pieces of paper were a right to those things held in that warehouse. And that's where the idea of an ETF came about. And basically the first one in the US was the S P 500, and it basically those instead of commodities being held in that warehouse, it's um stocks or the S P 500, the stocks that make up the S P 500 held in.

Um, by a custodian. So those stocks are held by somebody. And what that means is at all times, the key thing that makes an ETF work and why it's super efficient is because you can always access those underlying stocks. Or in or in the example of the commodities, you can always those access those underlying commodities. So basically, those shares are a right to your ownership of the underlying asset. So in the SP 500 ETF, you can always trade in shares of the ETF and get back the underlying stocks. In the potential Bitcoin ETF, it would be the same way. You could always trade in the shares of the ETF and get back Bitcoin, or vice versa, you can always trade in Bitcoin and get back shares. And what that means is we can get into this more, but like one thing that I'm sure a lot of your viewers have heard about is GBTC, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. That operates more like what we what in our world we would call a closed-end fund. It's technically not one, but it means ETFs have that mechanism where you can create shares and redeem shares because always the underlying can be exchanged for the shares of the product, right? So in Grayscale's case, there's no way to access the underlying Bitcoin. I can't hand over GBTC, GBTC shares and get back Bitcoin, which is what Grayscale is suing to do to try and get access to that mechanism so that you don't have a situation where the price of those shares is very different from the value of the underlying assets they hold. So when you have an ETF, that problem doesn't happen because you can always, at some point, if somebody thinks the price of the ETF is not in line with the underlying asset, you can buy those shares of the ETF or buy up at the underlying asset and exchange them. It's called arbitrage. They're always the same thing. So basically there's some trading costs, so there's minute differences there, but for the most part, you can always exchange shares for assets. And that's what caught what's causing a lot of the problems in different parts of the market. So the way to think about an ETF is if you're used to looking at stocks or even cryptos, really, right? You it's you know the supply. So for the most part, Bitcoin's expit's a bad example since its supply is ever increasing. But if you look at a stock, typically the the supply of shares is relatively stable, right? It's you know what it is, and what drives the price is that change in demand. So if you think about like two bars in a graph, basically the what drives the price of most assets is the change in demand, right? Obviously, supply impacts it as well. The benefit of ETFs is as demand changes, you can change supply. So you can add more shares to meet demand, and if demand drops, you can destroy shares to meet demand. So that way the price and the value of the underlying assets. So the price of the fund, the price, the value of the underlying assets are always going to be very close. So that's the background of an ETF and why so many people view this as like the um the key to um the holy grail for crypto and bridge to the TradFi.

You you just opened up probably a thousand questions in my mind, and uh you want to get to them. That that last point that you mentioned, I want to draw an analogy for bankless listeners. So as um the demand changes, you can increase the supply. Uh USDC, you know, a stablecoin kind of works like that as well. Um, think of that, right? So how much uh USDC can be minted? Well, kind of pretty much, as long as uh the US continues to give access to Coinbase and circle to US bank accounts and kind of an unlimited supply. It's as much as as the market will demand. And it sounds like ETFs work that way too. So uh a few things, just to recap. So this is a newish product, I guess, in the in the full scope of financial products. Um, you said it sounds like it was invented maybe in the late 1980s, so it kind of took off.

Ninety three was the first one. So technically

94.

I told I told you about that guy, Nate Most. Yeah. He actually went the first ETF ever launched was technically in Canada a few years because the SEC took like three years to get comfortable with the idea of this possibly being a thing.

Yeah, so Canada did it first in like ninety one after talking with Nate Most and these guys. So they got it done in like a year. Um and then we came along afterwards in the US and finally figured it out. Um but yeah, so 93 was the first time. And there they've for along the whole way there's been people questioning the the structure, saying it was going to cause issues, and they've done nothing but prove themselves as an efficient. It's the way to think about it is it's it's a wrapper and it's a technology in a way. It's a democratizing technology in the way it's been used in the traditional.

It's interesting that people would say that this would cause issues because it actually seems much simpler than the other kind of like um price exposure mechanisms based on derivatives and that sort of thing. It's like because it's pretty simple. It's just a wrapper for underlying assets, right? So like what can go wrong?

Yeah, so it the we we don't need to get too far into the weeds here, but essentially a lot of the people say like if you're looking at bonds, so they all there's bond ETFs, they hold other assets that are less liquid than typical stocks. Um but so people like think you're adding liquidity. There's a lot of nuance here, but essentially what it comes down to is in good in the good times, an ETF can be way more liquid than the underlying because people don't have to go and access the underlying market to trade it, right? They can just use the ETF shares and sometimes it just trades back and forth. There's a lot of market makers that can handle that. But in times of stress, that like excess liquidity the ETF offers is not going to be there. It's not magic. So basically, if the underlying market freezes up, like happened in in March of 2020 during COVID, um, those they basically the ETFs don't aren't, they're not magic. So if the underlying market is locked up, there's going to be issues with the ETF. But with an ETF, you can always trade. So basically, like, yes, in the good times, there's more liquidity because the ETF is there, it's operating on an exchange, there's market makers, there's always bids and ads. Um, if you think about a bond market, it's mostly over-the-counter traded, like literally some of it's like phone calls still, like that's the way things are traded still. But like basically what happens is like the the ETF will look like it's dislocated, but what really ends up happening is just the underlying market is out of whack. There's not enough liquidity, nobody's willing to buy or sell, or there's just mismatch of what's going on. So there's plenty of examples of things like that that happened in March 2020. But all the ETFs in the US and around the world have held up extremely well and were perfect beacons of efficiency during that time. Um, they really like proved their mettle. Even some of their most ardent critics even had to come step back and admit like they did extremely well in handling the issues. You sound like any.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the things we've always said is like we could we're gonna get into a lot of this, but like if the SEC had approved this thing, honestly, all the people and these markets, these market makers that operate in this market, like they're not going to let some of the fishy stuff that has been going on in crypto. Like they're gonna go to the exchanges that are operating cleanly. They're not gonna get involved in a lot of the other things that plenty of people have been involved in uh in this space. So if we do get one, it's gonna clean things up, it's gonna drive down trading costs, ETF's trade like penny wide.

Very, very tight. So there's no transaction fees on most brokerage platforms. The and then if you look at most brokerage platforms, they don't really tell you what the bid S spread is. You can kind of back into it by looking at like what the trading looks like on Coinbase or Binance or any of those things, right? But you there is a spread. So you know you're paying a fee typically to do the trade, and then there's also a spread between what the bid and the ask is. And like usually market makers are making that money. So there's a lot of money to be made in offering markets in the crypto markets. And when an ETF comes about, it's going to get way tighter. So you'll see a lot of people who trade Bitcoin specifically in crypto markets to learn to start to use the ETF. And vice versa, people from the ETF world will probably go um to the underlying crypto markets and make things more efficient and more liquid because you'll have the behemoths of the US trading and financial system come in.

I think I was uh first exposed to kind of the ETF concept uh just just you know earlier in my sort of uh you know adulthood and uh early investing career through like Vanguard group and and John uh Bogle, like the the idea that, hey, you know what, you don't have to like outperform the market. You just buy buy an index fund, buy a low-cost index fund of some sort, and you'll outperform, you know, like 80% of active uh traders out there. And so it's always been a good concept. And of course, you want to keep your management fees low. And uh my understanding is a lot of ETFs can can somewhat provide that. So that's what is that a reason? I mean, I want to ask you who are the holders of these ETFs? Is it um is it like kind of large pension funds? Is it sort of big money capital pools, or is it is it mainly like individual Americans, like retail investors with a Fidelity account or a Schwab account uh with their 40K money, as as you alluded to earlier? Who are the net buyers of these things?

So really it's that's the beauty of the ETF. It's everyone. So in the old mutual fund world, what you're used to looking at in your 401k or whatever it might be if you're a US listener, um there are multiple share classes. So like you need to ha ha invest a certain amount of money to get access to this lower fee because you get all these other things, right? Economies of scale, whatever. So they have all these different share classes, A, B, C, I for institutional. There's different things, right? But what the ETF did is it democratized it all. So everyone's playing in the same pool. So if your grandma wants to buy an ETF, she's buying the same ETF as Citadel if they're looking to trade that or some other big hedge fund or pension or PE fund. So really everyone is involved in this. And that's the beauty of the ETF ecosystem because it incorporates everyone. So you have all the liquidity from the big TradFi players who are looking to make short term trades alongside the mom and pops you were talking about, who some of them might be looking to do short term trades. A lot of them are just looking to buy and hold, like you were talking about, low cost ETFs and hold them for a very long time. They can get exposure. And part of the reason they can be so cheap is because so many people are using them, so many different types of people are using them.

How big is the ETF market, James, in terms of you know assets inside of uh ETFs? Are we talking hundreds of billions? Are we getting into the trillions here?

Yeah, no, we're definitely a trillion. So like we're right around ten trillion globally, but most of that is in the US. I believe we have I'm looking it up right now. I think we have seven. I think we're right around seven trillion um in the US alone. Uh I'll tell you the exact number. Seven point two five trillion. What do you find

Find that info. Is that like a Bloomberg term?

Yeah, that's a Bloomberg function. Um but I don't I I probably Vetify ETF.com, things like that will probably have that type of information, but the though global markets like over 10 as well. Um but that you gotta remember that includes like it holds stocks that's gonna hold bonds, it'll hold treasuries, commodities, everything you can think of if it has basically been thrown into an ETF wrapper. Even even cryptos, just not in the US.

Yeah.

What right, right? We'll get we'll get there to crypto. I, you know, we're building here, building our understanding here. Okay, so uh $10 trillion worldwide. How much of that would you guess is kind of like uh retail mom and pops versus like the big guys? Uh

It's hard. So a lot of the so if you look at the way the US market works, like for the most part, a lot of the money is via advisors and platforms. So we can't see exactly how much is retail, but a lot of people will use advisors. So roughly we estimate right now that US advisors, the people that are helping, like if you went to somebody to help you manage your money, right? Um they they control about 30 trillion in assets and they love ETFs, specifically independent advisors. So um the way the old mutual funds I keep talking about used to be sold is there was basically kickback. So if you put your client into this fund, you got some money out of it and possibly into perpetuity and different things like that. So basically mutual funds were sold um by people that were wholesalers and trying to get advisors to put their clients in those funds because they get more money. Everyone basically the money gets is kicked back all over the place. ETFs, it's not some of that kind of happens, but it's not directly the case. It's more that ETFs are bought. Um, so advisors are huge owners of this, hedge funds like to use these things. Institutions are using these things to park money for the most part because they're super low cost. So retail, uh we we don't have a like clear breakdown on that front, but it's a a decent chunk, I would say uh at least 30%, probably more, um, just because a lot of it is buy and hold. But there's also plenty of ETFs that are not built to be bought and held. Some of them are built to be traded. And like I said, the SEC came about this because they wanted an alternative to um futures and different things that were happening. So they wanted people to be able to use these and trade. And there are some ETFs out there, like the SP 500 from SPY and plenty of others that we refer to as like pseudo-futures, where institutions are using them for liquidity. So like they had they got a certain amount of money, they can't put it to work fully in exactly what they want to. Um, so they're gonna throw it into an ETF. Or like you even have mutual funds, some of those guys that we're talking about that are picking bonds, picking stocks. And what they'll do is they'll pick, they'll hold an ETF in like 3% of their portfolio or 4% of their portfolio. If they're a large cap manager, they'll hold a large cap equity ETF. If they're a high yield bond manager, they'll hold a high yield corporate bond ETF. And basically they just use that like sleeve, almost if you think about it as a moat around their portfolio. They're picking the bonds they think are going to outperform the most, give them the best, whatever characteristics they're looking for. And then rather than holding cash, which is what they did historically, which doesn't give them exposure to the market, it's called cash drag. Um actually, in the last couple of years, it might not have been that bad with the way rates have gone. But um, essentially what they do is they want to have exposure to the market, but they know that ETFs are super liquid. So I keep going back like everyone uses this. People across the traditional financial ecosystem are using ETFs in many different ways.

Yeah, and I'm I'm looking at kind of a list of uh different ETFs, and you probably have a better list in your head, but so you know, like you can basically buy any uh collection, any set of assets in an ETF. So we mentioned, you know, the SPY, it's a SP 500 index if you want general stock index in the US. Uh, you know, there's a NASDAQ. We've got equity uh uh precious metals. So you can buy a gold ETF. Um, I'm sure you could buy silver, I'm sure there's all sorts of other commodities you can buy. Platinum,

Palladium, you name it.

yeah, I know.

Uh I've seen um, you know, certainly yeah, oil ETFs as well, if you're kind of want to go down the commodity stack, real estate ETFs of of various types. I don't know if it gets as specific as like, let's say I want to bet on the real estate market in California. Maybe that's a bit too specific, but you know, maybe maybe they have something like that. Actually, they

They do have some stuff. They have muni bonds that focus on they have muni bonds that hold focus on that. So you could bet on the California Muni market. Um but also like the the basically there are those real estate ones, they don't hold physical real estate, they own REITs with the real estate investment trusts, which have been all of the news lately because public REITs are trading very different from private REITs. But ETS will wrap those things as well and hold them, so give you exposure. So like maybe one REIT specializes in like the southwest United States. So they'll have California, Arizona, whatever. Um, and so you if that's what you're after, you could just buy the REIT that's kind of similar to like buying a stock. And these will give you like here's the US market, or here's a here's a REIT for like multifamily homes or stuff like that. There, there's it's becoming sliced and diced in different ways. There are REITs out there that focus specifically on like retail warehouses or data warehouses that hold all these servers. So like it they own the real estate and people rent those warehouses to put all their servers in them. And that that has been one of the best performing areas of the READ market. So like there's ETFs that specifically target that. So yeah, there's ETFs that you buy specifically targeting.

markets. Can you just buy like dollars in an ETF or something? Could you buy

Yeah, there's actually

Yeah, so there's some dollar ETFs that like basically they the way those work though isn't like they're just holding dollars. There are money market fund ETFs elsewhere. There's money market funds, obviously, that aren't ETFs. For the most part, people just use like treasury ETFs if they're looking for that type of exposure. Um because it just holds treasuries, the treasury bills specifically, you can look at T bill ETFs. Um, but yeah, there are some money market ETFs in Canada, just not in the US yet. But again, you get those T bill um type ETFs and they're they're they give you a very similar um exposure. Otherwise, there's ones that basically um you can bet on the direction of the US dollar. So it'll go like long US dollar futures and then shorts a basket of other.

Currency future sort of short the Great British pound, the Japanese yen,

the Euro, um, Brazilian real, like you name it. So it'll tell you what it's going long and what it's going short. And that's how you could bet like tactically on where the dollar's going.

All right, for crypto natives, crypto listeners, um, TradFi, uh, you thought of this idea of tokenization before crypto did. This looks a lot like tokenization of different assets, doesn't it? Um okay, so this other point that you raised, which is like the thing that's different about ETFs, is you can always access the underlying assets. I think that will come into play when we talk a little bit about crypto. Again, we're still building to the crypto conversation, James, but this idea of you can always access the underlying assets. I want to um get into the details of that, right? So for something like stocks, it's it's weird, it's interesting because like when we say the underlying assets, what are we talking about actually? Like a piece of paper or like legal documents somewhere? I want to contrast that from a commodity like uh gold or like oil, for example, where the underlying asset

at the root of it is much more clear. The underlying asset is like a barrel of oil somewhere in a warehouse, uh you know, you hope at least

So so actually, so for oil, it's you mentioned I meant I was debating saying this before, but like oil, one of the we we like to call some ETFs are like wolves in sheep's clothing because they look like they're simple. There are no ETFs that hold physical oil because you can't really store it, it costs too much money. Um, there's a multitude of reasons. There are some people, like I know some people who are thinking they want to try give it a try, but really all the oil.

oil.

Yeah,

Warehouse oil.

they want but the only way to really get oil and the oil ETFs work is they they roll they they invest in futures, they invest in derivatives, um which is how a lot of commodity ETFs also work, except for those precious metal ones you were talking about, and there are some others, but

All right, well, so let's talk about those. So first let's talk about maybe the precious metal ones. So if I buy a gold ETF of some sort, um, where is the actual gold bar you know stored? And can I actually like can I actually redeem that for gold? And you said you said it's always able to access the underlying assets. I want to convert my uh my gold ETF into like you know a physical bar of gold. Am I actually able to do that or are there some intermediaries in between here?

yeah, so this is gonna get in the weeds of like market mechanics of ETFs a little bit, so I'll do I'll do my best to keep it simple. But essentially the way to think about it is um there are

There's a few people involved in a creation redemption process. So usually it's it's what we refer to as a market maker. Think of those as the big trading firms, the citadels. If people out there have heard of obviously people have heard of Jane Street, if you're listening to your show, uh Virtue. Those are they are big ETF market makers. They're they're pairing trades and they will access the underlying if they have to make a trade happen, or it's more efficient to do it that way than just sourcing the under the actual shares in the exchange. So I keep saying at any point you can access the underlying market to create or redeem shares. These market makers know that and they know what's more efficient. Is it more efficient to just source the actual ETF shares, or is it more efficient to go to the underlying market and make this happen? Sometimes the buy is so big that there's not enough shares to be demanded, so you have to go to the underlying market to make it. Um that might be a little more uh costly, or it could be more efficient than buying those that many shares in the market. Like it's the same thing as like a big whale comes to a crypto market and buys a ton of Bitcoin, you're gonna blow through the price. But if you could theoretically figure out a way to buy Bitcoin more efficiently, um that's how you would do it. Um so but the way this works is those are the market makers. There's also something called an authorized participant, which has been in the grayscale situation as well. And the APs are the people that facilitate that creation thing. These are the huge banks with massive uh balance sheets. Think uh Bank of America, uh Goldman, there's a whole bunch of APs out there, Merrill Lynch. They they'll basically like they are the people that facilitate that creation of shares and redemption of shares that work with the issuers that own these ETFs. Now, for the most part, it's these market makers and these APs that are making sure that the market is efficient in the underlying, if you need to tap the underlying market, whether it's to create ETF shares or destroy ETF shares, they're the ones doing it. So the market makers are constantly trading every day, they're dealing with the APs, the APs are dealing with the issuers. In some instances, not to get too wonky, the market makers can be an AP as well. But like essentially it's these people, these institutions that have specifical specific licenses to operate in whatever markets that can operate in those markets and make the creations and redemptions. That said, that's the way most things work. Because for the most part, you need like 100,000 shares of the ETF to do a creation or redemption, right? So these are big.

So like if you if you that was what make like you or I or actually I don't know maybe you're a whale but like if you wanted to buy an ETF it's these people on the back end that are batching the entire market together to make sure it's operating it efficiently. There's very low cost to trade. Um all of those things they're making sure that the ETFs are created or destroyed to for demand to meet supply. Um now that said, there are ETFs out there like O UN Z for gold ETFs. This is a gold ETF, and basically

The the creation and redemptions are way lower, the minimum. So like there is going to be a cost. If you owned enough, you could get gold delivered to your house. But that's like a special exemption that they went through to get to happen. But also, like most ETFs hold their gold in vaults in London. Um, there is one that holds it in Switzerland. Uh there is an ETF that used to hold it at the Perth Mint in Australia.

So there's like all these different ways you can do it. Everyone has different custodians, but gold is like a unique subset. So some people like the true gold bugs are like I don't trust anyone to hold my gold. There's a lot of issues where people are worried about paper, paper gold with futures. But for the most part, the gold has to be stored in the vault, and every share of the ETF should be backed by physical gold. Now, sometimes the trading is literally like some guy in London goes into the vault for the spider GLD and takes gold out and moves it to the vault down the street for like some other trading firm or gold trading firm or whatever, what may have you. Um but like at on to our view, like that's m gold leaving the trust that we we were interested in or the one we were looking at and going into a different one, right? That's a creation and redemption. Um

So

Hopefully they're using a Brinks truck or some you know security apparatus for that for that transfer. But