A member of a Bitcoin trading club posing with a Bitcoin medal at the club's meeting in Tokyo.

The 150 percent increase in bitcoin this year and 26-fold surge in the price of has attracted a whole new swath of investors to the cryptocurrency market.

Big institutions like endowments and pension funds are still on the sidelines as they try to assess how to approach this emerging asset class and, more importantly, whom to trust with their money.

But for wealthy individuals and family offices, there are exchange-traded funds and other types of listed funds popping up to offer some level of exposure.



Another type of fund — the special purpose vehicle — hit our radar on Friday.

An entity named i2 Storj SPV raised $2.4 million from a group of 30 investors, according to a filing with the SEC. The firm behind the vehicle is Iterative Instinct Management, a New York-based hedge fund that specializes in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

Iterative used the capital to invest in what's called an (ICO), a new way for crypto start-ups to raise money by selling tokens. In this case, the ICO came from a start-up named Storj, whose technology uses excess capacity on individual computers to create a cloud storage alternative to the services being provided by massive companies like Amazon and Microsoft.