In 2018, most of crypto was busy building the next exchange, the next token, the next app that promised to replace your bank. Hany Rashwan and Ophelia Snyder went the other direction. They looked at the messy, exhilarating world of digital assets and asked a deliberately unglamorous question: what if the thing standing between ordinary investors and crypto was not technology, but a ticker symbol? Answer that, they reasoned, and you would not need to convince anyone to download anything.
The company they founded in Zurich - first called Amun, later rebranded to 21.co - became the parent of 21Shares, now the world's largest issuer of crypto exchange-traded products. Its pitch is almost aggressively simple. You already have a brokerage account. 21Shares gives it something new to hold: bitcoin, ether, solana, dogecoin and dozens more, packaged inside regulated products that settle the same way a stock does. No seed phrases, no cold wallets, no exchange logins. Just a line item on a statement your accountant recognizes.
01 · The BetRegulation as a feature, not a tax
The contrarian move at the heart of 21.co was to treat regulators and exchanges as distribution partners rather than obstacles. While large parts of the industry framed compliance as a cost to be minimized, 21Shares listed the world's first physically-backed crypto ETP - HODL - on the SIX Swiss Exchange in 2018, a basket of major cryptoassets in one tradable wrapper. A year later it launched AXTZ, described as the world's first staking ETP, passing on-chain staking rewards to investors inside a regulated product.
The through-line is access. Snyder has said she wanted to build crypto investing technology simple enough for her own mother to use, and that framing - accessibility first - shaped almost every product decision that followed. It was, by her own description, a contrarian bet in an industry that often prized ideology over usability.
We are still unbelievably early in the lifetime of spot bitcoin ETFs. Ophelia Snyder, Co-founder & President, CNBC (2024)
02 · The MachineOnyx, the operating system nobody sees
Turning a volatile digital asset into a clean exchange-traded product is less about marketing and more about plumbing - custody, market-making, creation and redemption, reporting. Rather than stitch that together from off-the-shelf parts, 21.co built its own end-to-end platform, Onyx, in 2019. Onyx is what issues and operates the ETPs, and it is also what mints and burns the company's on-chain wrapped tokens. The same engine is offered to third-party issuers, quietly turning an internal tool into a product line.
That second use - wrapped tokens - is where 21.co's two identities meet. Starting in 2023 the firm rolled out a suite of 1:1-backed assets (21BTC, 21SOL, 21XRP, 21ADA, 21DOT, 21LTC, 21BNB and 21BCH). Each is a token on a blockchain like Ethereum or Solana, backed by the real underlying asset held in institutional cold storage. In 2024 it expanded 21BTC onto Ethereum and integrated Chainlink Proof of Reserve, so the backing can be verified on-chain rather than taken on faith. The message to skeptics is blunt: don't trust us, check the reserves.
AUM figures move with crypto prices and are drawn from company statements and public reporting; treat as approximate.
03 · The ProductsWhat you can actually buy
The lineup splits into a few clean buckets. Single-asset ETPs give exposure to one coin. Staking ETPs bundle rewards. Index ETPs - such as the Future of Crypto Index and FTSE Crypto 10 products - offer a basket for people who would rather not pick winners. And in the United States, the ARK 21Shares partnership put crypto on the shelf next to conventional funds.
Those products reach investors through the mainstream rails 21.co deliberately courted - names like Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Robinhood and Interactive Brokers show up on the company's own list of where its US products can be bought. The customer base skews institutional - hedge funds, wealth managers, financial advisers - but the whole point of the wrapper is that a first-time retail investor can buy the same thing without learning what a private key is.
With this round of financing, we will continue to drive rapid, targeted growth through first-of-their-kind products, key market expansions and strategic talent acquisitions. Hany Rashwan, Co-founder & CEO (2022)
04 · The MoneyFees on a growing pile
The business model is old-fashioned in the best sense. 21.co is an asset manager: it charges management fees on the money it looks after, with product fees in the range of roughly 0.21% to 0.30%. When assets under management climb from around $150 million in 2020 to more than $11 billion in 2025, that fee stream compounds. Layered on top is the technology arm - licensing Onyx and issuing wrapped tokens - which extends the same custody-and-issuance capability beyond the exchange-traded world.
Investors noticed early. A 2019 seed round drew in Cathie Wood and ETFS Capital founder Graham Tuckwell. In September 2022, a $25 million Series B led by Marshall Wace - with Collab+Currency, Quiet Ventures, ETFS Capital and Valor Equity Partners - valued the company at $2 billion, making it what local press called Switzerland's largest crypto unicorn. In 2024 the firm reorganized into two units, 21Shares for asset management and 21.co Technologies for tokenized assets, giving each its own leadership and runway.
05 · The FieldWhere it sits in the market
21.co competes with a recognizable roster: Grayscale, Bitwise, CoinShares, WisdomTree and VanEck in crypto funds and ETPs, and, since 2024, the giants of the US spot ETF market - BlackRock and Fidelity. Its edge is time in the category and product breadth. Being first to a physically-backed ETP, first to a staking ETP, and early to build a partner relationship with ARK gave it a head start in a market that only recently became crowded.
In 2025 that position drew a buyer. Digital-asset prime broker FalconX acquired 21Shares, folding the world's largest crypto ETP issuer into an institutional trading and liquidity platform - a tidy illustration of how thoroughly crypto and traditional finance have converged, which is more or less the future 21.co was built to bet on.
06 · The TimelineSeven years, one direction
- 2018Founded in Zurich. Rashwan and Snyder launch HODL, the first physically-backed crypto ETP.
- 2019Firsts and first funding. AXTZ staking ETP, the Onyx platform, and a seed round backed by Cathie Wood.
- 2022$2 billion unicorn. A $25M Series B led by Marshall Wace.
- 2023Wrapped tokens. A suite of 1:1-backed on-chain assets minted via Onyx.
- 2024Spot ETFs and a split. ARKB and CETH launch in the US; the company reorganizes into two units.
- 2025Scale and acquisition. 50 European ETPs, $11B+ AUM, and the FalconX deal.
There is a neat coincidence buried in the branding. The logo is simply the number 21 - the same figure as bitcoin's fixed supply cap of 21 million coins. It is the kind of detail that suggests a company entirely comfortable with the asset it packages, even as it spends its days making that asset behave like something far more ordinary: a ticker you can buy before lunch and forget about by dinner.