UK Brokerage Hargreaves Lansdown to Start Offering Crypto ETN Trading

According to a report from the Financial Times, Hargreaves Lansdown is starting to offer cryptocurrency ETN trading to around 2 million of its investors starting today. To begin with, it will offer nine different ETNs linked to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

These ETNs come from well known providers including BlackRock, WisdomTree, 21Shares, Invesco, CoinShares, and Bitwise, and the yearly fees for these products range from 0 percent all the way up to 0.35 percent.

This is a notable shift because Hargreaves Lansdown was previously the only major investment platform in the UK that did not allow crypto ETN trading at all. In fact, just last October, the company had publicly said that Bitcoin is not an asset class. Now, less than a year later, they are reversing that position and opening up crypto trading to their investors.

The obvious question this raises

Less than a year ago, this same company was telling the public that Bitcoin does not even count as a real asset class. Now they are offering nine different crypto products to two million everyday investors. That kind of complete reversal in such a short time naturally makes people ask what actually changed. Did the company genuinely change its view on crypto as an investment, or did they simply not want to keep losing customers to competitors who were already offering this option. Most UK platforms had already added crypto ETN trading before this, so Hargreaves Lansdown was increasingly standing out as the one platform still saying no. This move looks less like a bold new belief in crypto, and more like a business decision to stop losing customers and market share.

There is also a bigger concern here that goes beyond just this one company. When a platform that spent months warning people away from crypto suddenly starts offering it, some of its usual investors, people who trusted that cautious stance, may now assume the product is fully safe simply because a trusted brand is offering it. But offering something and something being genuinely low risk are two very different things. Crypto ETNs still track a highly volatile asset, and packaging it inside a familiar sounding investment product does not remove that volatility, it just makes it easier to access.

Finally, the fee range itself deserves a second look. A yearly fee that goes from 0 percent up to 0.35 percent sounds attractive on the low end, but investors should be careful to understand which specific ETN in this lineup actually carries which fee, and why the 0 percent option might exist in the first place. Very low or free fee structures in financial products often shift cost elsewhere, or exist mainly to draw in a larger volume of investors and assets under management for the provider. Investors should not simply choose the cheapest option without also comparing how each ETN is structured and backed.