Hashdex

Here is a fact about crypto that sounds like a joke but isn't: for most of its history, the hardest part of owning it was owning it. You needed a wallet, an exchange, a seed phrase you were then instructed to write on paper and never lose, ever, or your money is gone with no customer-service line to call. This is a strange way to run an asset class, and it kept a lot of otherwise-interested people - pension funds, financial advisors, your uncle with a brokerage account - politely on the sidelines.

Hashdex's insight, and it is a genuinely good one, was that the coins were fine. It was the packaging that was broken. If you could wrap crypto in the same boring container that already holds stocks and bonds - a regulated, exchange-traded fund - then the whole apparatus of Wall Street would suddenly know what to do with it. No wallets. No seed phrases. Just a ticker.

So that is what they built. Founded in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro by Marcelo Sampaio, Bruno Caratori and Thiago Costa, Hashdex is not really a crypto company in the "we launched a token" sense. It is an asset manager that happens to manage crypto, which is a different and more patient kind of business. Its core belief is almost aggressively unsexy: crypto is an asset class, so treat it like one - with an index.

In 2020 the firm partnered with Nasdaq, an institution with roughly half a century of experience running markets, to co-develop the Nasdaq Crypto Index. This is a small detail with large consequences. If you build the ruler that everyone else measures against, you have quietly made yourself part of the furniture. Many of Hashdex's competitors now benchmark their products against an index Hashdex helped write.

In 2021 came the payoff: the world's first crypto index ETF. Not the first Bitcoin fund, not the first crypto fund - the first one that let you buy a diversified basket of crypto in a single, regulated line item. The same year, investors noticed. Hashdex raised a $26 million Series A led by Valor Capital Group, with SoftBank, Coinbase Ventures, Igah, Canary, Globo Ventures and others joining. The pitch that got them to write checks was not a whitepaper. It was a wrapper.

Then came the long, unglamorous grind of regulatory approval - the part that doesn't trend on Twitter. Getting a spot crypto ETF past the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission took years of filings, arguments, and waiting. In February 2025 Hashdex launched NCIQ, the first multi-asset spot crypto ETF in the United States: one ticker holding Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana and more, designed to expand as the market and the rules evolve.

The genius of NCIQ is that it asks investors to do less. Most people, it turns out, do not want to pick the winning blockchain the way they don't want to pick the winning search engine in 1999. They want to own the category and get on with their day. NCIQ lets a financial advisor add "crypto" to a portfolio the way they'd add "emerging markets" - as one allocation, not seven separate headaches.

By 2026 the firm had crossed $1 billion in assets, cut NCIQ's fee to 0.25% in a widening price war, and reshuffled its leadership - Caratori to Global CEO, Sampaio to Executive Chairman, Mick McLaughlin running the U.S. None of this is fireworks. That is precisely the point. Hashdex's entire bet is that the future of crypto looks less like a casino and more like a Tuesday.