Golden Finance reported that Ophelia Snyder, co-founder of 21Shares and its parent company 21.co, said in an interview that the Bitcoin custody products used by spot Bitcoin ETF providers are "completely different from the products that the retail industry gets on cryptocurrency exchanges." We use Coinbase as the custodian of U.S. products. I put my money on Coinbase as Ophelia Snyder, and I put my money on Coinbase as 21Shares. The two products are structurally different. When someone puts assets on an exchange as a retail user, trading platforms such as Coinbase usually put customer assets in a comprehensive account, where user assets such as Bitcoin are pooled together without strict isolation. It and other people's money are all there, and ARK and 21Shares' spot Bitcoin ETFs use strictly isolated accounts.
Additionally, a spot Bitcoin ETF is also safer from a bankruptcy perspective. If everyone in 21Shares disappeared tomorrow, there is a mechanism to use a trustee to recover those assets directly from Coinbase.
