Level of access: it refers to how closely an investor can interact with or from a digital asset in its purest form (on-chain). The more off-chain layers or wrappers around an asset, the less level of access. For example, the spot bitcoin ETF is a traditional (offchain) financial product backed 1:1 by bitcoins stored in a qualified custodian. Being cash-redeemable only, investors can’t redeem their shares for actual bitcoin, but they must liquidate them for cash.
On the other end of the spectrum, self-custody is the purest, most direct access to the on-chain asset, with instant settlement and with the ability to do things with that asset directly – be it transferring, swapping, staking, lending, or borrowing against it – without the need for proxies or additional settlement layers.
