Crypto Exchange Coinbase Launches Four-Coin Index Fund, Only For Accredited Investors

Crypto exchange and wallet Coinbase has announced the creation of both the Coinbase Index Fund and Coinbase Index in a Medium post yesterday, March 6.

The Coinbase Index Fund, whose “basket of digital assets” includes all of the Coinbase exchange GDAX’s four coins — Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) — is open to all US-resident accredited investors–defined by those having a net worth of more than $1 mln or a yearly salary of more than $200,000.

There will be a 2 percent annual management fee, and a minimum sum of $10,000 is required to invest in the four-coin index fund.

The Coinbase Index will track the performance of the GDAX’s four coins based on the “ongoing increases in supply of each asset,” not just each asset’s price.

As Cointelegraph reported last fall, the problem with diversifying a cryptocurrency portfolio is the fact that most altcoins follow whatever trend that Bitcoin sets. Accordingly, when Bitcoin’s price falls, the altcoins’ prices tend to see a similar drop, implying that “diversification into other coins provides little market hedge.”

Coinbase has recently been in the news when they informed around 13,000 of their customers of a mandatory turnover of their personal data to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) following a partial court case win against the IRS’s original request for the data of every Coinbase customer.

Coinbase is also currently being sued in two new lawsuits brought forward in early March. The first is a class action lawsuit alleging that Coinbase employees benefited from trading on the advance knowledge that Coinbase was set to add BCH to its assets last December.

The second lawsuit purports that Coinbase kept unclaimed coins that were sent through email as opposed to turning them over to the State of California or informing the senders of their unclaimed status.