Scotiabank and 3iQ unveil Canada’s new multi-crypto ETF
Scotiabank and 3iQ launched the Dynamic Active Multi-Crypto ETF on Cboe Canada, offering exposure to bitcoin, ether, solana, and XRP in March 2026.
Bradley Hughes 5 min read
Canada’s spot bitcoin ETF market has, until now, mostly belonged to specialist issuers: Purpose, Evolve, CI, 3iQ. That changed on March 4, 2026, when Dynamic Funds, a division of Scotiabank-owned 1832 Asset Management, listed the Dynamic Active Multi-Crypto ETF on Cboe Canada, marking one of the Big Six banks’ most direct entries into crypto-holding products to date.
What the fund holds
The ETF trades under the ticker DXMC and takes an actively managed approach across four assets: bitcoin, ether, solana and XRP, plus a portion allocated to companies benefiting from Web3 and blockchain development. That structure sets it apart from the single-asset spot bitcoin ETFs that have anchored the Canadian market since Purpose’s 2021 listing. DXMC is a basket, with an active manager deciding weightings rather than tracking one asset’s spot price.
The inclusion of an equity sleeve alongside direct crypto holdings is also a structural choice worth noting. Rather than limiting the fund to the four digital assets themselves, DXMC allocates a portion to shares of publicly listed companies whose business is tied to Web3 and blockchain development, which introduces a second, indirect way of gaining exposure to the sector’s growth. Equities in companies building blockchain infrastructure carry their own set of risks distinct from the coins themselves, including conventional business risk, management execution, and equity market volatility that doesn’t always move in lockstep with crypto prices, so the equity sleeve changes the fund’s risk composition rather than simply adding more of the same exposure.
What “actively managed” means for a crypto basket
The active-management structure is the detail that separates DXMC from simply buying equal amounts of four coins. A passive, single-asset fund like Purpose Bitcoin ETF tracks the spot price of one asset directly, with the fund’s job limited to holding the underlying bitcoin securely and letting the unit price follow it. An actively managed multi-asset fund instead puts a portfolio manager in the position of deciding, on an ongoing basis, how much of the fund’s assets sit in each of bitcoin, ether, solana and XRP, plus the Web3-and-blockchain equity sleeve, rather than fixing those weightings at launch and leaving them untouched. That structure gives the manager latitude to shift weightings in response to how each asset is performing or how its risk profile is viewed, which is a meaningfully different value proposition than a passive basket, and one that comes with the manager’s own judgment as an added variable investors are implicitly trusting alongside the underlying assets themselves.
The partnership behind it
Dynamic is a division of 1832 Asset Management L.P., itself owned by Scotiabank, one of Canada’s five largest banks by assets. Its partner on the fund is 3iQ, founded in 2012 and describing itself as Canada’s first regulated digital asset fund manager, with a track record that includes pioneering Bitcoin and Ethereum ETPs and staking integrations. Mark Brisley, Head of Dynamic, framed the launch around market maturity: “We have witnessed an evolution in the maturity of crypto assets, supported by growing investor demand, institutional adoption and regulatory progress.” 3iQ CEO Pascal St-Jean called the tie-up “a meaningful step in the convergence of traditional finance and digital assets.”
The fee structure
Dynamic set DXMC’s stated management fee at 0.45%, but cut it to a promotional 0.25% through March 1, 2027, pricing it competitively against the single-asset bitcoin funds already on the market, whose management expense ratios have ranged from roughly 0.68% to 1.30% depending on issuer.
The promotional structure is a common launch tactic in the Canadian ETF market generally, not something specific to crypto products: a lower introductory fee draws in early assets and trading volume while the fund establishes itself, with the rate stepping up to its stated level once the promotional window closes. An investor comparing DXMC to a single-asset bitcoin fund on cost alone should weigh the fee against what happens after March 2027, when the rate reverts to 0.45%, still below several single-asset competitors’ management expense ratios but a meaningfully different number than the launch-period pricing that’s likely to dominate early marketing.
What the four-asset mix means for risk
Holding bitcoin, ether, solana and XRP together inside one fund is a different risk profile than holding any single one of them, and not automatically a lower-risk one. Diversification across multiple assets can reduce the impact of any single coin’s price collapsing relative to the others, but crypto assets have historically shown a tendency to move together during broad market downturns, meaning the diversification benefit that a multi-asset structure offers in calmer periods can shrink considerably during a sharp, market-wide selloff, when correlations between individual crypto assets tend to rise. The fund also concentrates exposure across assets with meaningfully different underlying technology, market capitalization and regulatory histories, XRP in particular has a longer and more contested US regulatory history than bitcoin or ether, which is a factor an active manager weighing allocations has to account for that a single-asset bitcoin fund never has to consider at all.
Why a bank’s name on the fund matters
None of the mechanics here are new: Canada has had regulated, exchange-listed crypto exposure since 2021, and multi-asset crypto ETFs already existed before DXMC. What changes is distribution and trust signaling. A fund sponsored by a division of one of the country’s largest banks reaches advisors and retail investors who would not have gone looking for a specialist issuer’s product on their own, and it puts a Big Six name behind the proposition that regulated crypto exposure belongs in a mainstream Canadian portfolio lineup rather than a niche corner of it.
Advisor networks are the channel where this distinction matters most. Independent financial advisors, and the bank-affiliated advisors who work within Scotiabank’s own wealth management arm, are considerably more likely to bring up, and recommend, a product from a name their own institution already stands behind than to independently research and pitch a specialist issuer’s fund to a client who hasn’t asked about crypto directly. That distribution advantage doesn’t make DXMC’s underlying holdings any less exposed to crypto’s characteristic volatility, but it does mean the fund is likely to reach a segment of Canadian investors, people working with a bank-affiliated advisor rather than self-directing their own portfolio, who have historically had less exposure to crypto products than self-directed investors trading on their own through a discount brokerage.