All good: Bitcoin Fund to proceed with IPO

Investment fund
manager 3IQ Corp on Thursday announced it had filed The Bitcoin Fund’s Initial
Public Offering (IPO) prospectus.

The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) received the prospectus dated Nov. 27 having previously rejected it. Details of the filing indicate that Bitcoin Fund plans to issue two sets of units each priced at $10.

According to the entity’s documents, Bitcoin Fund is a crypto-focused
fund manager established under Ontario’s
laws, adding that “the units will be an eligible qualified investment for
registered investment accounts.”

Details of the announcement
stated that the fund’s core objective is to help investors take advantage of
Bitcoin as an asset and its daily price movements against major currencies.

3IQ, which
manages two other private digital asset funds for Canadian investors was
founded in 2012, and it will be Bitcoin Fund’s underwriter and portfolio manager.
For a while now, 31Q has been working hard to see the first crypto-based
company go public.

Bitcoin Fund,
through 31Q, had originally filed a prospectus with OSC’s Investment Funds
& Structures Projects branch (IFSP) in October 2018 but the regulators raised
a number of concerns about the listing, saying that the IPO wasn’t in Canadian’s
public interest. As a result, the IFSP director dismissed the IPO early this
year.

But the company
decided to repeal the decision that saw OSC Commissioner Lawrence P.
Haber rule
that the concerns “do not warrant
denying a receipt for The Bitcoin Fund’s prospectus.”

Commission Haber
based his decision on the fact that securities regulators’ role is not to
approve or disapprove underlying investments being offered to the general public,
in this case, Bitcoin. He further added that “there is sufficient evidence of
real volume and real trading in bitcoin on registered exchanges in large dollar
size.”

After the ruling,
the Commissioner ordered the IFSP director to issue Bitcoin Fund with a receipt
for its prospectus unless new compelling evidence emerged warranting a rejection.

A few weeks later,
the company confirmed that the regulator had issued a receipt for its
prospectus. However, the fund underwriters stated that in accordance with the
ruling by Commissioner Haber, “there are remaining steps for completion before
a final offering prospectus can be receipted” including furnishing the regulator
with more details on its underwriters as well as the pricing of the IPO.