The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accelerated its efforts following a mistaken tweet on January 10th that prematurely announced the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which drew significant reactions from the crypto community. The very next day, the SEC formally approved the first regulated spot Bitcoin ETF applications in the U.S., marking a pivotal moment for institutional adoption of Bitcoin.
Investors are now eagerly anticipating the impact of this historic move. According to Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt Law School, the introduction of spot Bitcoin ETFs is crucial for the crypto and financial markets, providing a regulated investment path into Bitcoin, particularly for individual investors who might otherwise shy away from the less regulated crypto market.
The SEC’s approval on January 11th included 11 Bitcoin ETF applications from reputable institutional players such as Grayscale, BlackRock, Fidelity, WisdomTree, and Valkyrie. Valkyrie’s CEO Leah Wald announced that their spot Bitcoin ETF would be available to U.S. investors through brokerage or investment accounts, tradable on Nasdaq.
Wald expects over $400 million in asset inflows into Valkyrie’s ETF product within the first few weeks of trading, projecting billions of dollars moving into ETFs in just the first month as many investors have been waiting for such products.
While it’s too early to accurately predict the performance of the newly launched spot Bitcoin ETFs, Alex Tapscott from Ninepoint Digital Assets Group suggests that similarities might exist between the U.S. and Canadian spot Bitcoin ETFs. Canada was a pioneer, greenlighting its first spot Bitcoin ETF in 2021, with Ninepoint launching a spot Bitcoin ETF in May 2021 that brought in over a billion dollars in assets in its first month. Tapscott notes that the U.S. crypto market is significantly larger than Canada’s, indicating the potential for substantial growth.
