Signs Increasingly Point to January Approval of Spot Bitcoin ETF Applications

Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart expects the SEC to approve the projects en masse between January 8 and 10.

Approval of the latest Holy Grail in crypto, the spot bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF), seemed increasingly likely after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) expedited posting dates when comment periods will end for two of these products in the Federal Register on Friday.

The public must offer its input on spot BTC ETFs from Franklin Templeton and Hashdex ETFs by Dec. 22 with rebuttals no later than Jan. 5, 2024. Those deadlines will allow the SEC to decide all around the same time on those applications, along with 10 others that have been in process for months. Thirty-five-day comments periods for the ETFs could begin officially after postings in the Registry, which is the U.S. government’s official daily publication for rules and notices.

In a posting on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Bloomberg ETF research analyst James Seyffart wrote that potential approval orders would likely come between Jan. 8 and 10 of 2024.

“Mark your calendars people,” Seyffart wrote.

Window is officially Jan 5th to Jan 10th. Really this means that any potential approval orders are going to come on either Monday Jan 8, Tuesday Jan 9, or Wednesday Jan 10. Mark your calendars people. https://t.co/8ob8Y6pgU5

— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) December 1, 2023

In an interview with Unchained, Seyffart repeated his prediction that the SEC would approve the application en masse in early January. “The one thing we do know is that the SEC wants to approve a lot of these at once; they did it with the Ethereum futures ETFs,” he said. “They don’t want to pick winners. They don’t want to be a kingmaker here, they want to basically approve everyone at the same time, which is why we we’ve been saying since October that we were [at] 90% probability that this is going to happen by January.”

The SEC is weighing 13 applications for spot BTC ETFs, although the latest application by Swiss-based Pando Asset was filed only two days ago and is unlikely to be considered with the earlier submissions. The SEC rejected multiple applications last year and approval seemed unlikely with the regulator’s Chair, Gary Gensler, frequently signaling his deep concerns about the products, which depend primarily on the price of the largest crypto by market cap.

Read More: Crypto Asset Manager Pando Files Application for Spot Bitcoin ETF

Rekindled Hope

But a filing in June by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, rekindled hopes that the SEC would grant its seal of approval, and other financial powerhouses, including Fidelity, followed suit. The raft of ETF applications, a willingness of the SEC to meet individually with contingencies from the different projects and other favorable signs have boosted the price of bitcoin and other crypto assets in recent months.

Earlier this week, the SEC met with officials from Hashdex and Grayscale, the latter of whom is looking to convert its bitcoin trust into an ETF to provider wider accessibility to retail investors. In another promising sign, Grayscale just hired John Hoffman, the former U.S. head of financial services powerhouse Invesco’s ETF business, to lead what is likely to be a fierce competition with other spot BTC ETF providers for distribution. “I believe that Grayscale is the asset manager of the future, and is building this company by embracing the platform of the future,” Hoffman said in a Q&A on the Grayscale website.

Amid this week’s flurry of activity, bitcoin’s price climbed to near $39,000 for the first time since April 2022, according to CoinMarketCap data. BTC was recently trading at $38,746, up 2.6% over the past seven days.

Bloomberg’s Seyffart said that the earlier-than-expected notice in the Federal Register “might have seemed like not much…but there’s a reason there’s a lot of hoopla around it. It’s just kind of solidifying the view because January 10 was always the bogey.”