SEC Delays BlackRock, Fidelity, And Other's Spot Bitcoin ETF Applications

The SEC has just delayed BlackRock, Fidelity, WisdomTree, Invesco & Galaxy, VanEck, Bitwise, and Valkyrie’s spot Bitcoin ETF applications, as first reported by Bloomberg ETF analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas.

This was the first SEC decision deadline in the listing process for these applicants since filing, with the delays pushing these applications back another 45 days. The next bulk of deadlines are being slated for the middle of October. 

Earlier this week, Grayscale won its lawsuit with the SEC, resulting in the DC Circuit court of appeals vacating the SEC’s denial of Grayscale’s $GBTC conversion into a spot Bitcoin ETF. This means it will be sent back to the SEC, in which now the commission has 45 days to appeal and file for an en banc hearing, if they wish to do so. 

While this victory in court does not mean GBTC is automatically being converted to a spot Bitcoin ETF, this ruling does help bring us one step closer to one being approved by the SEC. Because the U.S. court of appeals shot down the SEC’s reasonings for denying Grayscale’s application, stating, “The Commission neither disputed Grayscale’s evidence that the spot and future markets for bitcoin are 99.9% correlated, nor suggested that market inefficiencies or other factors would undermine the correlation…The Commission’s unexplained discounting of the obvious financial and mathematical relationship between the spot and futures markets falls short of the standard for reasoned decision making.”

Yesterday, Bloomberg analysts Seyffart and Balchunas upped their approval odds by the SEC for a spot Bitcoin ETF to 75% by the end of this year, and to 95% by the end of 2024.

More information on the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF race can be found here.