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Maybe it would allow mutual funds and other such entities to invest in it?

They might have rules preventing them from investing in things that aren't traded on major exchanges.

I'd be kind of surprised if mutual funds were doing much investing in this kind of ETF. Look at the shares outstanding of FXE, FXA, FXB (currency etfs for euro, australian dollar and pound), they're not very popular. Some hedge funds do use these and famously Paulson was using GLD for his gold exposure (I still think this is pretty dumb, he should've traded futures and EFP-ed into spot gold). Wouldn't be shocked to be proven wrong, but most ETFs don't gain traction. There's also a pretty small cap on how big this ETF can get (at least for now), almost by definition the commodity backing a bitcoin etf has a much much smaller availability than the commodity backing any other etf. I am glad they're using cold storage to store them at least.

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