Crypto fund fascination

The price of spot Bitcoin surpassed $38K yesterday but the coveted handle proved elusive. As of this morning, BTC was down 1% over 24 hours. At the same time, a big BTC futures fund, ProShares’ Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO), has reached a record high for assets under management which this week crossed $1.47 billion. The prior record was set in December of 2021.

BITO, with its listing on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, falls under the jurisdiction of U.S. commodities regulators.

As has been widely discussed in recent weeks, there's a growing roster of money managers seeking approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch ETFs that track the spot price of BTC.

And a new entrant has just tossed a feathered alpine hat into the crowded ring: Pando, a Swiss firm, filed an application. It currently offers crypto products in Europe.

Earlier this month, per some widely followed Bloomberg ETF analysts, the SEC seemed to have a tight window in which to wave through a parade of approvals for pending spot BTC ETF product applications. However, that week-long window came and went.

Interestingly, two asset managers, Franklin Templeton and Hashdex, were recently informed by the SEC that the agency was postponing decisions on their proposed products. The SEC had until the end of this year to officially punt on the launch requests by Franklin Templeton and Hashdex. Such a proactive double shot of delays seems to suggest, as Bloomberg analysts now theorize, that the SEC is getting its ducks in a row ahead of a one-fell-swoop measure to approve all of the pending applications.

Spot BTC ETFs are said to now have a "clear runway," Cointelegraph said.

Elon Musk, a mogul's mogul at the vanguard of space exploration, EVs and AI, is flailing at public discourse.

Musk finds his X platform shunned by heavyweight corporate advertisers, like Apple and Disney, at odds with what some see as him permitting, even promoting, hateful posts on the X platform that he owns.

Asked about the platform-revenue-denting ad boycott during a Q&A session at DealBook's conference in New York City yesterday, Musk lashed out: "Somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Go f--- yourself.”

Musk has apologized for his past inflammatory X posts.

In other technology overlord developments, exiled Sam Altman, after a two-week power struggle, is back in charge at OpenAI. As this drama unfurled, decentralized prediction markets saw bustling activity tied to prop bets on whether Altman would be reinstated while the AI coin sector leaned into all of the attention.

The largest AI-themed/related coins in terms of market capitalization include The Graph and Fetch.ai, among others.

Several AI tokens had notched double-digit gains as of about ten days ago. Checking in on GRT today at 8:45 a.m. (EST), we find the 49th-largest crypto down 2.2% in the past day and flat on the week. As for FET, it's flat today but up 9% on the week.

Altman's Worldcoin, an ambitious, distinct project (not connected with OpenAI), has been described as a kind of a universal income moonshot. With its market capitalization of $280M, WLD is the 156th-largest digital asset.

In the past 24 hours, as of 8:55 a.m. (EST), WLD had shed 6%. WLD is down 1% since the Altman saga began.

The BTC-futures-backed BITO ETF breaking its AUM record underscores the demand for "a familiar, accessible and regulated way" to target Bitcoin returns, a ProShares strategist told CoinDesk.

BITO's certainly accessible. The fund has seen average daily trading volume of $160 million since inception. In terms of trading activity, this level puts BITO in the top 5% of all U.S. ETFs.

Meanwhile, Grayscale is seeking to enhance market efficiencies ahead of GBTC possibly becoming a full-fledged ETF.

To that end, the best-known digital asset steward has proposed making changes to its trust fund structure, allowing for monthly fees to be collected going forward on a daily basis, a move seen as GBTC taking one step closer to conversion. Grayscale also wants shareholders to vote on allowing GBTC assets to be commingled by way of a custodial omnibus account so as to better grease the skids when it comes to creating/redeeming shares, a bedrock mechanism for how ETFs are maintained (CoinDesk).

“Today, Grayscale has outlined proposed amendments to GBTC’s Trust Agreement that we believe are beneficial," a Grayscale spokeswoman said. "This is in our normal course of business. GBTC remains ready to uplist as a spot Bitcoin ETF upon appropriate regulatory approvals."