For many investors, digital assets remain a category defined more by headlines than by fundamentals. In a recent session hosted by Scotia iTRADE, Pascal St-Jean, CEO of Coincheck Group and 3iQ, joined David De Pastena of Dynamic to walk through the essentials — what digital assets are, how crypto ETFs work, and how they might sit within a diversified portfolio.
One of the most common misconceptions Pascal addressed is treating the digital asset universe as monolithic. He outlined three distinct categories: blockchain infrastructure assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana; stablecoins, which function primarily as digital payment mechanisms; and tokenised assets, which bring real-world instruments onto a shared digital layer.
The distinction matters for portfolio construction. "It's the first time in history where the asset is also the technology," Pascal noted. The distinction matters for portfolio construction. Investing in Bitcoin means taking a view on a decentralised store of value. Investing in Ethereum or Solana means taking a view on programmable blockchain infrastructure — the layer on which decentralised applications, smart contracts, and tokenised assets are built.
Pascal drew a clear line between Bitcoin and the programmable blockchains. Bitcoin was designed with a fixed monetary policy — 21 million coins, encoded into the protocol — making it function as a form of digital gold: scarce, decentralised, and designed for value storage rather than daily transactions.
Ethereum and Solana were built with a different purpose: to support any type of decentralised financial application or protocol. Where Bitcoin is robust and fixed, these networks are designed to be flexible and programmable, enabling the smart contracts and decentralised exchanges that underpin much of what is happening in digital finance today.
"Think of an ETF as a regulated and convenient way to access digital asset investments,” Pascal said. For retail investors, the impact was immediate: crypto exposure became available through existing brokerage accounts, eligible for RRSPs and TFSAs, with no need to manage private keys or navigate unregulated exchanges.
For institutions, the ETF wrapper solved a different problem. Sovereign wealth funds and pension funds face layers of compliance and governance before making any investment.
The first wave of crypto ETFs focused on providing clean, low-cost access to individual assets. That is changing. The market is now seeing staking-based ETFs that can generate yield potential on Ethereum or Solana holdings, covered call strategies applied to Bitcoin, and actively managed portfolios spanning the broader digital asset universe.
The Dynamic Active Multi-Crypto ETF (DXMC) – developed by 3iQ in partnership with Dynamic – is one example of that evolution: an actively managed ETF designed to provide diversified exposure to selected crypto assets, as well as companies that may benefit from the development or adoption of blockchain and related digital asset technologies.
"The same evolution you are seeing in traditional finance – from passive to active, from single asset to portfolio – is now happening in digital assets," Pascal observed.
Watch the full webinar: