History maker BTC hugs $47K

Ending a long, tense, often confusing standoff, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as widely predicted, yesterday afternoon approved the listing and trading of a slew of spot Bitcoin ETFs. Two of them started changing hands in Thursday's pre-market trading hours. Shares of BlackRock’s Nasdaq-listed iShares Trust (IBIT) had already popped by 22.5% before the sun came up on the East Coast of the U.S.

Volume is said to be high, probably by carefully orchestrated design, Bloomberg pointed out with a note of caution. Cointelegraph reports Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) ETF shares, listed on the NYSE, rose 2%. Fittingly, GBTC wound up being the first mover. “I am happy to confirm that GBTC started pre-market trading at 4 a.m. (EST) this morning,” Grayscale’s head of communications, Jennifer Rosenthal, told CoinDesk via email.

As for spot BTC itself, the per-token price as of 6:48 a.m. (EST) stood at about $47,000 on a 24-hour increase of 3.2%.

Total crypto assets hit $1.88 trillion, per CoinGecko. That's roughly a +5% change versus this time yesterday when BTC ETF approval was seen as likely but still a full day away from official.

Confusion, and reticence, continue to hang dark-cloud-like over crypto regulation. The first application for an ETF tracking the spot price of BTC was filed a decade ago. Going back to 2018, the SEC turned away more than 20 filings for spot BTC products (called ETPs by the agency). Prominent among those rejected filings was one made by Grayscale, seeking to convert its closed-end, over-the-counter-traded Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into a full-fledged, publicly traded ETF. Grayscale ultimately sued the federal regulator, and won, turning the tide. Approval odds swung favorably this summer when BlackRock, apparently confident in handwriting that the giant money manager spotted on the wall, filed an application to launch a spot BTC ETF.

The saga reached a crescendo with courtroom battles and enforcement actions, while waiting-in-the-wings Wall Street behemoths jostled to grab their piece of the proverbial tiger's tail.

Meanwhile, with the finish line coming into view, the drama of Tuesday's SEC hack – resulting in a fake announcement that BTC ETFs had approved – continued to weigh on a bewildered marketplace throughout yesterday. X's safety team would end up claiming that an unknown party was able to gain control over the phone number associated with the @SECgov account; and that the account did not have the security measure known as two-factor authentication enabled, said CoinDesk.

During the day yesterday, more and more clues of the inevitable piled higher, heightening the drama. Fidelity and E-Trade hastily set up brokerage website home pages for the slate of BTC ETFs. The Cboe BZX exchange started taking steps to list shares of spot BTC ETFs, stating at one point yesterday that trading was set to begin (today), even though, as CoinDesk noted, no official SEC announcement had yet arrived.

Euphoria followed the official news which came on Wednesday just prior to the close of trading, at about ten minutes before 4 p.m. (EST).

In a begrudging statement yesterday afternoon, SEC Chair Gary Gensler was quick to underscore that the green lighting of 11 spot BTC ETFs doesn't mean that crypto writ large is suddenly fair game.

Let the history books show that roughly 16 hours later, not a single Top 100 coin was in the red, per CoinGecko.

Many were up by double digits, percentage wise. XRP gained 10%. Cardano gained 20%. Sui, a DeFi stud, shot up 34%. Ethereum Classic (ETC) surged nearly 50%. Ethereum itself was up 12%.

Oh wait. Okay, No. 100, Akash Network (AKT), was down by 1.5% over 24 hours as of 7:50 a.m. (EST).

A key excerpt from SEC Chair Gary Gensler's statement on the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs: "We are now faced with a new set of filings similar to those we have disapproved in the past. Circumstances, however, have changed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that the Commission failed to adequately explain its reasoning in disapproving the listing and trading of Grayscale’s proposed [ETF].The court therefore vacated the Grayscale Order and remanded the matter to the Commission ... based on these circumstances ... I feel the most sustainable path forward is to approve the listing and trading of these spot bitcoin [ETF] shares."

Some structural color from Douglas Yones, NYSE Head of Exchange Traded Products: "For market makers that are out there – and we've got dozens of market makers that provide liquidity for our ETFs that are going to step in – they've had natural hedges available to them. We have a very nice price-discovery process."

A victory lap from Kristin Smith, CEO, Blockchain Association, giving her regulatory outlook going forward: "The approval of a Bitcoin ETF adds more pressure on Congress to pass fit-for-purpose legislation for the digital asset ecosystem. Consumer demand is poised to grow exponentially and those consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs deserve clear regulations that address many of the outstanding questions the industry has been urging our elected officials and regulators to answer."

Cory Klippsten, CEO, Swan Bitcoin, telling CoinDesk how massively the game has now changed: "The top-of-funnel for Bitcoin is now represented by the most established and trusted Wall Street institutions which will proceed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars extolling the virtues of Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin. Now that the primary entry points for Bitcoin exposure do not include appeals to gamble with hundreds of dubious crypto tokens, we just might see the end of massive crypto pump-and-dump cycles."

Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence, a pied piper of sorts in terms of spooning out via social media one inside-the-sausage-making-process observation at a time: “Order granting accelerated approval ...  it’s over."

A commenter in Balchunas' X thread: "No, it's just begun."

More from the SEC's Gensler: "Importantly, today’s Commission action is cabined to ETPs holding one non-security commodity, bitcoin. It should in no way signal the Commission’s willingness to approve listing standards for crypto asset securities ... nor does the approval signal anything about the Commission’s views as to the status of other crypto assets under the federal securities laws or about the current state of non-compliance of certain crypto asset market participants with the federal securities laws."

Gold advocate Peter Schiff, opining last week on a scenario in which spot BTC ETFs are approved but anticipated institutional demand doesn't ensue: "Be careful what you wish for."

Goldman Sachs on institutional demand for BTC ETFs: "It may not be immediate."