The SEC has made official its consideration of the request by VanEck and Cboe to issue a bitcoin ETF.
The registration took place on March 15th, and now the SEC will have 45 days to decide whether to approve or reject the application, or extend the review period.
Therefore, by the end of April, it will be known whether the first US bitcoin ETF will be authorized, whether this application will be rejected too, or whether the SEC as usual will take even more time to decide.
In the past, all such applications have been delayed until they were rejected or withdrawn by those who submitted them. It is therefore likely that the SEC will again take more time to respond, even though the clock is ticking.
Theoretically, the agency could extend the review period up to 240 days before having to make a final decision.
Why the SEC might approve VanEck’s Bitcoin ETF
That said, there are now at least three other similar requests, and in Canada, for instance, bitcoin ETFs have already been approved and are widely traded. It is hard to imagine that the US SEC will continue to allow such competition, leaving the field open to neighbouring Canada.
Moreover, the new chairman of the agency, Gary Gensler, seems to be quite optimistic about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, and may therefore be less hostile to such requests.
In other words, the current situation appears to be quite different from the one of the past years, which led to the rejection by the SEC of all other applications for approval of a bitcoin ETF.
Such a derivative product could be of particular interest to private investors who are already trading in traditional markets such as Forex and therefore struggle to find a quick and easy way to take a position on the BTC price.
This is also the reason behind the SEC’s main concerns in this regard, however, in the last 12 months the crypto markets seem to have matured quite a bit, and bitcoin now seems to have rightfully entered the so-called mainstream finance scene.
It is possible that the approval of the first US bitcoin ETF, should it happen, could have a positive impact on the price of BTC.
