The Toronto Stock Exchange’s parent company has already completed a major deal this year: its acquisition of ETF education company VettaFi.

According to TMX Group CEO John McKenzie, the deal helps expand its exchange-traded fund business globally.

“The exchange-traded fund is essentially one of the most important innovations in investing in the marketplace history — at least in the last 20 [to] 30 years,” McKenzie told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “What we were really looking to do is … get deeper into providing more support to our clients.”

Even though ETF activity has cooled off from its 2022 records, action in 2023 was still above previous years, according to iShares data.

McKenzie plans to utilize the VettaFi acquisition to facilitate more ETF creation.

“ETF providers can create new products and great solutions so that they can reach a broader investing audience,” McKenzie said. “That’s the one two punch of what we’re doing with that investment.”

TMX’s ETF Screener lists 1,264 ETFs and ETF-related funds on the Toronto Stock Exchange as of Friday.

With VettaFi in the exchange’s tool belt, McKenzie hopes to create new ETFs focusing on Canada’s economic strengths and how they can reach international investors.

“We want to be more global than local,” added McKenzie. “This is a great asset to help us build not just in the U.S., not just in Canada, but around the world.”

Since the acquisition was completed on Jan. 2, TMX shares are up 11%.

Disclaimer

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.

Coinbase is confident that a U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded fund will be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, told CNBC.

“I’m quite hopeful that these [ETF] applications will be granted, if only because they should be granted under the law,” Grewal said in an interview with CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal.

The SEC was recently dealt a major court setback when a judge ruled that the regulator had no basis to deny crypto-focused asset manager Grayscale’s bid to turn its huge GBTC bitcoin fund into an ETF.

The SEC last week declined to appeal that ruling by a key deadline, likely paving the way for a bitcoin-related ETF to be approved in the coming months.

“I think that the firms that have stepped forward with robust proposals for these products and services are among some of the biggest blue chips in financial services,” Grewal added.

“So that, I think, suggests that we will see progress there in short order.”

He didn’t say when that’s likely to happen, and added the caveat that any decision would ultimately be up to the SEC.

But, Grewal said, it’s likely now that the SEC will approve a bitcoin ETF soon, highlighting the regulator’s failure in court to block Grayscale from converting its GBTC bitcoin fund into an ETF.

“I think that, after the U.S. Court of Appeals made clear that the SEC could not reject these applications on an arbitrary or capricious basis, we’re going to see the commission fulfill its responsibilities. I’m quite confident of that.”

The SEC declined to comment on Grewal’s comment when contacted by CNBC.

A bitcoin ETF would give investors a way to own bitcoin without having to make a direct purchase from an exchange.

That could be more appealing to retail investors looking to gain exposure to bitcoin without having to actually own the underlying asset.

Coinbase would likely benefit from any bitcoin ETF that is ultimately approved. The company, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, is a common stock held in portfolios designed to give investors exposure to crypto.

Not all is rosy in Grayscale’s bid to turn GBTC into an ETF, however.

The asset management firm’s parent company, Digital Currency Group, along with crypto exchange Gemini and DCG subsidiary Genesis, were accused in a lawsuit from New York’s attorney general of defrauding investors of more than $1 billion.

Still, Grewal sounded a positive note on the prospect of additional bitcoin ETFs being approved — sooner rather than later.

“We think that other ETFs are going to be coming online soon enough as the SEC follows the law and is required to apply the law in a neutral way to the applications that are pending,” he said.

Bitcoin has risen about 72% in the year to date, in a comeback by stealth for the world’s biggest digital currency after huge declines in 2022.

There’s been greater investor demand for the token in recent months, as the market reacts to prospect of the Federal Reserve ending its campaign of persistent interest rate rises, and as anticipation builds around the upcoming bitcoin “halving” event, which will see rewards to bitcoin miners reduced by half, thereby limiting the coin’s supply.

Still, trading volumes have declined, as retail investors have become uninterested in engaging in the market in light of a lack of volatility and in response to severe wounds suffered by once-large industry players like FTX, BlockFi and Three Arrows Capital.

FTX collapsed into bankruptcy last year after investors fled the platform en masse because of concerns over its liquidity. The company and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, are accused of defrauding investors in a multibillion-dollar scheme. Bankman-Fried is standing trial over these allegations and has pleaded not guilty.

Addressing the trial, Grewal said he was “quite encouraged and quite optimistic that a number of the bad actors in this space are being held to account through criminal trials and through aggressive regulatory actions.”

“We are quite excited that there are a number of developments we think that are just around the corner, or underway even as we speak, that will bring back investor and consumer interest in crypto,” Grewal added.