Monochrome Asset Management is an Australian digital-asset fund manager and the issuer of the Monochrome Ethereum ETF (IETH), which listed on Cboe Australia in October 2024 as one of the first spot Ether products on an Australian exchange. For a tokenisation operator, Monochrome is the worked example of the dual-access ETP design pattern in a regulated APAC market: in-kind subscription and redemption directly from crypto platforms, decentralised wallets, or cold wallets through a bare-trust structure, rather than the cash-only creation/redemption model most spot crypto ETFs use elsewhere.
What it is
Monochrome runs IETH (Ethereum) and a companion Bitcoin product, IBTC, both listed on Cboe Australia. The bare-trust structure is the distinguishing design choice: because the trustee's actions are treated in law as the investor's own actions, transferring ETH into the fund does not trigger a change in legal or beneficial ownership, avoiding a capital-gains event on entry that a conventional in-cash ETF structure would create. BitGo and Gemini provide custody. As of 31 March 2026, IETH's AUM was reported around AUD 5 million, the smallest of the four Australian-listed spot ETH products by that measure, alongside Global X 21Shares (EETH), BetaShares (QETH), and VanEck (ETHV) (Stockspot, 29 Apr 2026).
Relevance to tokenisation
IETH is not confirmed as staking-enabled in current public disclosure; see Australia for the fuller ETH ETP shelf comparison and the open question this raises. Monochrome's relevance is structural rather than about AUM scale: the dual-access, in-kind bare-trust pattern is a design choice other APAC issuers evaluating a spot-crypto-ETP launch would want to study, independent of how large any single product's book currently is.
Related
- Australia for the regulated ETH ETP shelf this product sits inside.