Bitcoin ETF battle rumbles on as Gary Gensler and the SEC try to hinder ‘unstoppable’ progress
The week in review, with Jason Deane
This week has, once again, been all about ETFs and the underlying asset, Bitcoin itself.
Essentially, we seem to have a battle of wills on our hands.
On the one hand, we have people like Michael Saylor at MicroStrategy consistently adding to their corporate coffers with an announcement of yet another purchase this week of 5,445 Bitcoin. This means Saylor now owns close to 1% of all the Bitcoin that will ever be in existence, a staggering amount that will almost certainly never again be available to the general market. I don’t think there’s much doubt at this stage that more purchases will be following.
At the same time, we have a wall, or perhaps more accurately, a sheer cliff, of money ready, willing and able to invest in Bitcoin via ETFs as soon as they are able to via behemoths such as Blackrock, Fidelity, Templeton Franklin and several others. The decisions to do this have clearly been made within those organisations, and yet one man still stands in the way.
That one man, Gary Gensler, is now under enormous pressure to unleash this money from seemingly all angles. His organisation has already faced public humiliation from the courts over the last few months, informing him that his decision not to grant Grayscale’s conversion from trust to ETF was no less than “arbitrary and capricious” – a comment that Gensler has rejected in subsequent interviews.
At the same time, an increasing number of Senators have written to him this week urging him to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF on the basis that if a derivative based ETF has been approved, then there is no basis to reject a spot ETF. This makes sense because, although they are fundamentally different products, they actually carry the same requirements for compliance under existing SEC rules.
In short, you can’t have one without the other without some serious justification as to why and, thus far, the SEC has failed to explain what that justification is or why they won’t clarify it. The institutions who are waiting in the side wings are clearly less than impressed, and, every day that goes by, investors are forced to use inferior or unregulated products if they want to invest into that sector, thereby removing the very protections that the SEC is supposed to provide in the first place.
Gensler, as ever, continues to dig his heels in and remains vague and evasive, even under the intense questioning of Congressman Warren Davidson in this week’s House Financial Services Committee Oversight Hearing. I can actually feel the frustration of the committee members amongst growing calls for his resignation.
Almost as if to prove his point, perhaps even in retaliation for being publicly grilled yet again, the SEC announced this morning the further delay of several large ETF applications from BlackRock, Invesco and Bitwise. The move perhaps wasn’t a surprise, but the timing definitely was, since these ETF decisions are not even due until mid-October.
The question is – who will crack first?
Despite all of this, the markets remain broadly green. That’s the great thing about crypto and especially Bitcoin: governments, banks and other agencies really do have very limited powers in practical terms against a global market that is unstoppable if the people simply decide they want to use it anyway.
And they very obviously do.
Have a great weekend!
JD
Yesterday’s Crypto AM Daily
In the Markets
The Bitcoin Economy
*Data can be found at https://terminal.bytetree.com/
🌅Total crypto market cap
🔵 $1.08 trillion
🔺 2.71%
What Bitcoin did yesterday
🔺 Daily high $27,283
🔻 Daily low $26,339
Bitcoin market capitalisation
🟠 BTC $529.22 billion
🟡 Gold $12.47 trillion
💳 Visa $481.8 billion
Bitcoin volume
🪣 Total spot trading volume $14.37 billion
🔺 11.09%
SP500
🔺 0.59%
FTSE/JSE Top 40
🔺 0.65%
Fear and Greed Index
Bitcoin’s market dominance
📊 49.94
Relative Strength Index (RSI)
💪 62.97
Values of 70 or above indicate that an asset is becoming overbought and may be primed for a trend reversal or experience a correction in price, while 30 or below indicates an oversold or undervalued condition.
📣 What they said yesterday
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Cautionary Notes
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