Goldman Sach's new 'DeFi' ETF is anything but

The proposed fund, dubbed the Goldman Sachs Innovate DeFi and Blockchain Equity ETF, strives to track the Decentralized Finance and Blockchain Index from German financial indices provider, Solactive.

The fund will invest at least 80% of its assets into securities, stocks, and depository receipts featured in the index.

The filing asserts the index seeks to offer exposure to firms aligned with two key narratives: “the implementation of blockchain technology,” and “the digitalization of finance.”

As of July 23, the top stocks included in Solactive’s decentralized finance index included Nokia, Facebook, Google, Accenture, and Fujitsu — each of which represented between roughly six and seven percent of the index.

The likes of PayPal, Microsoft, Visa, and Overstock comprise smaller shares of the index, with Solactive also tracking China’s Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu among the 20 assets in its DeFi index.

Fans of crypto-native DeFi index products are likely to be disappointed by the methodology underpinning Solactive’s index, which requires a company to be listed on a regulated stock exchange, boast a market cap of more than $500 million, and have a daily average volume of at least $500 million for the past six months.

Solactive’s index is recalculated and rebalanced quarterly on the third Friday of each February, May, August, and November.

Related: Finding the sweet spot: Traditional financial institutions ready for DeFi

Goldman’s filing comes as institutions are increasingly taking note of the DeFi sector, with leading crypto asset manager, Grayscale, announcing plans to launch a decentralized finance fund last week.

Grayscale’s DeFi fund would offer institutions exposure to “blue-chip” tokens of the DeFi sector, including the governance tokens of leading protocols such as Uniswap and Aave.

Top DeFi money market, Aave, is also seeking to target institutional capital, launching a permissioned pool for institutions earlier this month.

Major investment bank, Goldman Sachs, has submitted an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an exchange-traded fund (ETF) offering exposure to public companies associated with the decentralized finance sector.