Last week, ETF Managers Group announced that their flagship cannabis ETF in the U.S., the ETFMG Alternative Harvest ETF (MJ) joined what they dubbed the “billion-dollar club,” having surpassed $1 billion in assets under management in early February.

The fund, which remains the only U.S. cannabis ETF to date is now the largest of its kind in the world, according to a statement released by the group. Despite the volatility of marijuana stocks throughout 2018, MJ managed continued growth at a pace of 9,600 percent throughout its first year in existence, as per a statement released last week.

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More impressive was the $9 million dividend paid out to investors, which breaks down to roughly a 1.36 percent yield per share. According to the Managers Group, investors who held on to the fund throughout the fourth quarter were “paid to own the fund,” as expenses were less than overall income.

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“When we launched MJ I talked about how at ETFMG we look to impact the ETF industry evolution with products that innovate and provide investors exposure to new markets, in fact, 75 [percent] of our products are first to market,” said Sam Masucci, CEO and Founder of ETFMG in a statement.

Due to the performance of Cronos Group (NASDAQ:CRON), Canopy Growth Corporation (NYSE:CGC) and Aurora Cannabis (NYSE:ACB) the Alternative Harvest Fund is up 46.6 percent on the year.

“We ended up converting a Latin American real estate REIT into what is now MJ,” Jason Wilson, the president of Budding Equity Asset Management Inc. and partner in MJ told PotNetwork last year in an interview. “So when we did that conversion, there were — I think it was $6 million of assets in the fund.”

“In the first few weeks after the conversion, we did get up to a few hundred million and closer to the over $400 million range in, we’ll call it, the first month,” he continued.

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MJ primarily follows the Prime Alternative Harvest Index, which looks at companies in both the medical and recreational sectors.