After years of back and forth with the U.S. regulators, VanEck’s exchange-traded fund based on Bitcoin futures has finally been greenlit and will begin trading on Tuesday on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE).
Key takeaways:
- VanEck’s Bitcoin Strategy ETF will be traded under the ticker XBTF. Tuesday’s launch will mark the third BTC futures ETH to begin trading in the United States in the span of the last month.
- On October 19, the first-ever BTC futures ETF started trading in the US after ProShares successfully launched its cryptocurrency-based financial instrument on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker BITO.
- The Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BTF) debuted on NASDAQ in the same week as BITO. BITO saw almost $1 billion in trading volume during its first day of trading. Judging by the record-breaking inflows, institutional investors were intrigued by new investing options.
- Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rejected VanEck’s application for a spot BTC, citing concerns over the potential for price manipulation as the main reason.
- At a Bloomberg conference held on November 4, a Republican member of the SEC, Hester Peirce, explained that the reason BTC spot ETFs have been repeatedly rejected over the years “is that the Bitcoin markets don’t look like our regulated securities markets.”
- An exchange-traded fund based directly on Bitcoin would be a game-changer for institutional-scale investors unwilling to use cryptocurrency exchanges or other crypto-based products to expand their exposure to digital assets.
- Perhaps the US regulators will change their tune on BTC spot ETF in the near future after witnessing just how much interest futures ETFs are generating.
