In a significant milestone for the crypto industry, the first bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) launched this week as the “second most heavily traded fund,” a move that sent the value of the digital currency to an all-time high at about $65,000.

Why should we care?
The ProShares bitcoin futures ETF will track bitcoin futures, rather than the price of the cryptocurrency. The fund, trading under the ticker BITO, yielded a first-day trading volume of more than $1B. A number of other bitcoin futures ETFs are expected to launch in the U.S., including VanEck, which plans to launch its fund on Oct. 23. “We are really excited to bring BITO, the first Bitcoin-linked ETF, to investors as an important opportunity for them conveniently to invest in Bitcoin in their regular brokerage account,” Simeon Hyman, global investment strategist at ProShares said in an interview. While the performance of bitcoin futures ETFs may be affected by misalignments between the futures market and the assets they track, it's a risk many investors appear willing to take to be able to gain exposure to crypto without procuring the digital assets themselves.