Treeplanting Bitcoin

Carbon negative (apparently) bitcoin ETF

Alberta-based fintech Accelerate is entering Canada’s lucrative ETF market with a bitcoin ETF that tries to reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

The Accelerate Carbon-Negative Bitcoin ETF (ABTC) will invest in the bitcoin futures. But what makes this interesting is that the fund intends to offset bitcoin’s high carbon footprint by planting lots of trees.

These trees will be planted with help from another company called H3M, who will receive 10% of ABTC's 0.69% management fee. H3M intends to plant mangrove trees in Madagascar.

Bitcoin ETFs are new in Canada, having only received the regulator’s greenlight in April. However the market has grown rapidly and how houses more than $2.5B in assets. The leading providers are Coinshares (with 3iQ) and Purpose.

Accelerate is the fourth bitcoin ETF provider in Canada.

Bernie's Commentary

Okay. I’ve got a lot of questions about this ETF. If these questions sound dumb, my apologies.

1. Why mangrove trees in Madagascar? Do mangroves take in more CO2? And are trees cheaper on the African island?
2. Do newly-planted trees (seeds?) take in any carbon dioxide at all? Plant the seeds now, and they take in the CO2 later when they grow into trees... right? 
3. How is this better than other environmentally-friendly cryptocurrencies like cardano, which use proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work systems? 
4. Isn’t the strong outperformance of cardano vs bitcoin the past year largely because of environmental concerns? And if so, isn’t that likely to just continue?
   
   

My instinct tells me that this ETF has an interesting approach and carbon reduction must be good, but this seems a convoluted way of achieving the aim, but in the world of cryptocurrency you never know what the future holds.