The Mount Rushmore of Bitcoin

For the real Mount Rushmore, each of the four presidential heads is meant to represent one of the following: the founding of the US, its expansion, its development, and its preservation.

The Winklevoss twins would best fit into the second slot of the Bitcoin version. Expansion.

Whereas Thomas Jefferson brokered the Westward Expansion — buying the Louisiana Territory from France for a cool $15 million, instantly doubling the size of the country — the Winklevoss twins sought to rapidly broaden Bitcoin’s influence with its first ETF.

Exactly 12 years ago today, the brothers filed for what they called the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust — a first-of-its-kind exchange-traded fund sponsored by the twins’ firm, Math-Based Asset Services, to the tune of $20 million in bitcoin (200,000 BTC).

One percent of BTC was about $11 million in July 2013, when each coin was worth $120, putting the Winklevoss’ unit count at around 100,000 BTC ($10.65 billion today).

The brothers had, three months earlier, disclosed that they’d quietly accumulated 1% of bitcoin’s circulating supply via their family office, Winklevoss Capital. 

“We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,” Tyler told the New York Times. Initially, each share would be worth 0.20 BTC, worth about $24 at the time and $21,000 currently.

Under the surface, the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust would’ve mirrored SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), with in-kind redemption, fees paid in BTC, and private keys to the Trust’s coins held under physical custody in bank vaults. 

The bitcoins were to be managed by a unit of Delaware Trust Company before the Winklevoss’ own Gemini was named in later filings. 

It was a bold first attempt at bringing bitcoin out of the more obscure financial fringes of the internet and into everyday brokerage accounts, or as the prospectus dryly put it: “The Shares are designed for investors seeking a cost-effective and convenient means to gain exposure to Bitcoins with minimal credit risk.”

The SEC took four years to formally reject the Winklevoss proposal. Any exchange offering bitcoin ETFs would need “surveillance-sharing agreements with significant markets for trading the underlying commodity or derivatives on that commodity. And second, those markets must be regulated,” the SEC said in March 2017. The move sunk the price of bitcoin by 18% at worst, but it quickly recovered and then some.

Bitcoin-backed ETFs would only arrive on US exchanges seven years later, in January 2024, almost eleven years after the original Winklevoss proposal.

A long time, to be sure, but it’s still three years faster than it took to sculpt Mount Rushmore nearly a century prior. 

And while the Winklevoss brothers never ended up launching their own ETF, Gemini is the custodian for VanEck’s bitcoin ETF, HODL, and has recently confidentially filed for an IPO.

All good news for the Winklevosses. Now, all we need is to bring back “Math-Based Asset Services” — easily the coolest name for a Bitcoin company we’ve ever known.

— David Canellis 

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