DAVOS, Switzerland — Grayscale Investments CEO Michael Sonnenshein told CNBC that most of the approved bitcoin exchange-traded funds won’t survive, while defending the highest fees in the market for the company’s own product.

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF is the world’s largest, with over $25 billion in assets under management.

When the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved a swathe of spot bitcoin ETFs earlier this month, much focus was on the management fees that firms from BlackRock to Fidelity were charging.

Many of the ETF issuers were charging 0% fees for a limited amount of time before raising them slightly. Most of the approved ETFs have fees of between 0.2% and 0.4%.

But the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF charges a 1.5% fee.

Sonnenshein laid out several reasons why it is charging that fee, including the fact it is the largest bitcoin fund, has a 10-year track record of “operating successfully” and has a diversified investor base.

“Investors are weighing heavily things like liquidity and track record and who the actual issuer is behind the product. Grayscale is a crypto specialist. And it has really paved the way for a lot of these products coming through,” Sonnenshein told CNBC in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

Sonnenshein said the reason other ETFs have lower fees is that the products “don’t have a track record” and the issuers are trying to attract investors with fee incentives.

“I think from our standpoint, it may at times call into question their long-term commitment to the asset class,” Sonnenshein said.

The Grayscale CEO said two to three of the spot Bitcoin ETFs “will maybe obtain some kind of critical mass” of assets under management, but that the others may be pulled from the market.

“I don’t ultimately think that the marketplace will have ultimately these 11 spot products we find ourselves having,” Sonnenshein said.

The immediate ban on nearly all Palestinian workers to enter Israel following the Hamas-led terror attack of Oct. 7 has dealt a shock to the Israeli economy, the country’s central bank chief said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“We’re working in a very uncertain environment, as you can tell, and I would say there are two types of shocks: there is a supply shock,” Bank of Israel governor Amir Yaron told CNBC’s Dan Murphy. “And it’s primarily in the construction industry where … a third of that industry is Palestinians from the West Bank, and now they’re not coming in to work.”

“It’s also affecting agriculture, where they are in, and there are other foreign workers,” Yaron said. “So that will take a little bit, that’s a negative supply shock, and it could affect prices going up towards the second half of the year.”

He said that the bank must monitor these price developments, adding, “On the other hand, we’ve seen negative demand shock, obviously in a war. And so far that negative demand shock has been the most dominant one. And we will have to monitor that as well, as we go forward with how we are thinking about continuing with monetary policy.”

Before Oct. 7, more than 150,000 Palestinian workers from the occupied West Bank entered Israel daily for work in a range of sectors, predominantly in construction and agriculture.

The ban on most of these workers returning to their employment in Israel has dramatically hurt the economy of the West Bank. It has also contributed to anger and rising unrest over Israel’s decades-long occupation and its relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which Palestinian health authorities say has killed more than 24,000 people. The Israeli offensive began after Hamas militants from Gaza launched a surprise attack on southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people and took another 240 hostage, of which 136 people remain in captivity.

In late December, Israel’s finance ministry warned that the ban on Palestinian workers could cost Israel’s economy billions of shekels per month.

“We calculated what the economic damage would be if Palestinians do not go to work…and it is estimated at approximately NIS 3 billion ($830 million) per month,” a representative of the finance ministry told Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, at the time, according to local media.

Business and factory owners in December pressured lawmakers to allow between 8,000 and 10,000 Palestinian workers to return to their jobs in Israeli settlements and businesses in the West Bank.

In comments reported by the Times of Israel, Raul Sargo, president of the Israel Builders Association, had told the Knesset: “We are in very dire straits … The industry is at a complete standstill and is only 30% productive. Fifty percent of the sites are closed and there is an impact on Israel’s economy and the housing market.”

Israel’s agriculture sector is also heavily dependent on foreign labor, in particular workers from Thailand — at least 10,000 of whom have left the country after the October attack, during which many Thai farm workers were killed and taken hostage.

Asked about what tools the bank has at its disposal to respond to a potential expansion of the war to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, Yaron stressed the focus on preventing financial instability.

“We all hope it doesn’t happen. In case it does, then your mindset becomes financial stability,” the banker said. “That means the whole view on interest rate process … expansionary monetary policy probably stops, and you use the types of tools we’ve used so far, like the FX or things like that, and we hope we don’t need to go there.”

Yaron added that he was optimistic about his country’s ability to deal with shocks, given its familiarity with wars over the decades.

“I think we still have to remember, Israel is a dynamic economy,” he said. “It’s resilient, it has shown it can bounce back … pretty much over every military event, it has shown that it can come back and grow fast. I would say, actually, Homeland Security, economics has demand for that has grown. And hopefully, if there is a day after in which there’s a better environment with moderate states, those will bring in also new opportunities.”

Executives from the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry told CNBC that the recent crash in the digital coin market should help get rid of “bad actors” in the space.

Billions of dollars of value has been wiped off the cryptocurrency market in the last few weeks driven by a sell-off in stocks and the collapse of algorithmic stablecoin terraUSD and its related token luna.

“We’re in a bear market. And I think that’s good. It’s good, because it’s going to clear the people who were there for the bad reasons,” Bertrand Perez, CEO of the Web3 Foundation, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“It’s good also, because all those projects are gone. So the legit ones will be able to focus only on developing on building and forget about the valuation of the token because everyone is down.”

“During the … bull markets when everything is green, no one thinks about building, everyone thinks about making a fortune, which is … the wrong mindset,” he added.

Mihailo Bjelic, co-founder of blockchain company Polygon, echoed the sentiment, calling the cryptocurrency sell-off “necessary.”

“[The] market, in my personal opinion, became maybe a little bit irrational, or maybe a little reckless to a certain extent. And when the times like that come, [a] correction is normally needed, and at the end of the day [is] healthy,” Bjelic said.

The sell-off in major digital currencies such as bitcoin and ether was sparked by a broader slump in stock markets, in particular the technology sector. The drop was worsened by the terraUSD stablecoin losing its $1 peg.

Large, institutional investors have been getting involved in the cryptocurrency market, and were also a key driver of the latest sell-off, according to Brett Harrison, president of cryptocurrency exchange FTX U.S.

He said that there has been a broader drop for risk assets, such as stocks, but that it’s affecting digital coins more than it has in the past because there is more institutional money in the space.

“If people are looking for assets to sell, crypto is going to be on the list,” Harrison told CNBC.

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, urged investors to take a longer term view.

“Bitcoin about two years ago right now, bitcoin was about $8,000. Now it’s at 30,000. So yes, there’s been a crash and a trillion dollars came off. But when you zoom out a little bit further and look at the long term trends, I think you see that crypto is here to stay,” Garlinghouse told CNBC.

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A new billionaire emerged every 30 hours during the Covid-19 pandemic, and nearly a million could fall into extreme poverty at around the same rate in 2022. Those are the sobering statistics recently released by Oxfam.

There were 573 more billionaires in the world by March 2022 than in 2020, when the pandemic began, the global charity said in a brief that was published on Monday, the first day of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland. That equates to one new billionaire every 30 hours, Oxfam said.

On top of that, it estimated that 263 million people could be pushed into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 because of the pandemic, growing global inequality and rising food prices that have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. That’s the equivalent of nearly a million people every 33 hours, Oxfam said.

The organization pointed out that billionaires were collectively worth $12.7 trillion as of March. In 2021, billionaire wealth represented the equivalent of nearly 14% of global gross domestic product.

Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International, said that billionaires were arriving at the Davos summit to “celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes.”

“The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them,” she said.

“Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive,” Bucher added.

Honing in on soaring wealth in specific business sectors, Oxfam said the fortunes of food and energy billionaires rose by $453 billion in the last two years, equating to $1 billion every two days.

For instance, food giant Cargill was reported to be one of four companies that control more than 70% of global agricultural market, Oxfam said. The corporation, owned by the Cargill family, generated a net income of nearly $5 billion last year — the biggest profit in its history. There are now 12 billionaires in the Cargill family alone, it said, up from eight prior to the pandemic. Cargill declined to comment when contacted by CNBC.

Meanwhile, Oxfam said the pandemic created 40 new billionaires in the pharmaceuticals sector. The billionaires are those who profited from their companies’ monopolies over vaccines, treatments, tests and personal protective equipment.

In order to prevent even starker wealth inequality, and to support people with rising food and energy costs, Oxfam recommended that governments impose one-off solidarity taxes on the pandemic windfalls of billionaires.

The charity also suggested that governments end “crisis profiteering” by introducing a 90% temporary excess profit tax on the windfalls generated by big corporations across all sectors.

Oxfam also proposed a permanent tax to rein in extreme wealth, monopoly power and the higher carbon emissions produced by the super-rich.

It said that an annual wealth tax starting at 2% on millionaires and 5% on billionaires could generate $2.52 trillion a year. That would be enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty, make enough vaccines for the global population, as well as deliver universal health care and social protection for those living in low and lower-middle income countries.

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