Exchange-Traded Product
An umbrella term for investment vehicles whose shares trade on a stock exchange, including registered funds, commodity trusts, and debt notes.
The umbrella covers three quite different legal structures. An exchange-traded fund is a registered investment company with a board and statutory custody rules; a commodity or grantor trust is a passive holding vehicle outside that registration regime; an exchange-traded note is unsecured debt issued by a bank, so its value depends on the issuer's ability to pay as well as on the index it tracks. Most United States digital-asset products use the trust structure, which means investors get exchange liquidity and a prospectus but not the specific protections of the Investment Company Act. In Europe, exchange-traded notes and certificates are common for the same reason, because fund rules there generally require diversification that a single-asset product cannot meet.
In practice
European digital-asset products are frequently structured as collateralized exchange-traded notes, where the issuer pledges the underlying asset to a security trustee, rather than as UCITS funds.
The common misunderstanding
That every exchange-traded product is an ETF with identical protections, when notes carry issuer credit risk and trusts are not registered funds.