Fidelity is now blocking new purchases of XBT Provider's BTC and ETH exchange traded notes (ETNs). Tickers for these were COINXBT and COINETH I believe.
Fidelity is not currently forcing sells of these ETNs. This is in comparison to Interactive Brokers which forced sales of these ETNs by a certain date back in 2018, otherwise they would have dumped them on the open market.
Going to be honest, getting a little tired of how fucking hard it is to buy something in a US-based IRA that isn't GBTC with it's stupid premiums (which is near 30% at the moment). And Grayscale's Etherereum *CLASSIC* Trust (ETCG) trades at a laughable 233% premium now, probably due to uninformed people thinking they are actually buying ETH and not ETC.
Does anyone know of any broker open to US IRAs that allows trading in the XBT Provider ETNs (
https://xbtprovider.com/ )? I see that they added ETNs for Litecoin and Ripple now.
As an alternative, has anyone looked at Amun's Crypto ETPs (
https://www.amun.com/ )? I see they have a basket ETP (top 5 crypto assets), and separate ETPs for BTC, ETH, and XRP. Volume looked low though and I am not sure if they market make like XBT Provider does. Also not sure if any US brokers trade them.
I really don't want to go the route of those self-directed LLCs styled as IRAs (like Bitcoin IRA does). There are a myriad of little "gotchas" on these accounts that can cause the whole account to be disallowed.
Before crypto, these accounts were promoted for real estate investors, and there were just as many "gotchas" for them as well. I remember an instance where someone put rentals in a solo 401k. They personally painted one of the rentals without charging the solo 401k for it. I think during an audit this was enough to disallow the *entire* account and put them on the hook for taxes!
If BTC goes to where we all think it is going, I can guarantee there will be a concerted effort to see if any events happened in the past that will cause the tax deferred treatment to be disallowed.
This is a little out of date, but drives home why:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2014/09/16/retirement-rich-list-gao-estimates-314-taxpayers-have-iras-averaging-258-million-each/#2bfbf39fb32cYou can see there were only 314 taxpayers in 2011 with more than $25mil in an IRA. A scant 25 BTC could be worth as much in the coming years.
An always hungry government will be looking at whatever ways it can to claw back that money. I know some earlier solo 401ks/IRAs for crypto promoted private key ownership, and I think just that will be enough to disallow a lot of the earlier accounts down the line if they are ever looked at.