© Reuters
The first spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) application, filed in July 2013, was denied in both 2017 and 2018. A decade has passed since that initial application, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected more than a dozen additional applications and repeatedly punted the date for deciding on others.
The ETF saga’s latest iteration saw Bitcoin (BTC) jump more than 6% as industry advocates celebrated a court ruling that affirmed what we already knew — that the SEC’s rejection of Grayscale’s ETF application was “arbitrary and capricious.” This was, of course, followed by the SEC delaying its decision on all seven pending Bitcoin ETFs, and a subsequent price drop.
Joseph Kelly is the CEO of Unchained, a Bitcoin financial services company he co-founded in 2016. He’s a graduate of the Texas McCombs School of Business.
