invezz.com
The price of Bitcoin (BTC/USD) shot past $59,000 late Thursday after Bloomberg reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would approve a Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF). SEC’s investor education office sent out a tweet of warning to investors yesterday:
Before investing in a fund that holds Bitcoin futures contracts, make sure you carefully weigh the potential risks and benefits.
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In the tweet, they included a link to a June bulletin with further warnings about the highly speculative nature of Bitcoin investments. This led members of the crypto community to deduce that the SEC would approve a Bitcoin-backed futures ETF. The fund will not invest in Bitcoin, but in futures contracts based on the crypto.
Bitcoin ETF approval coming next week?
According to optimistic analysts, the watchdog might approve at least one Bitcoin futures ETF next week. Recently, chairman Gary Gensler pledged support for such funds. On Thursday, Bitcoin gained 3.5% in less than an hour, approaching $60,000 for the first time in six months, CoinGecko data showed.
40 Bitcoin ETF filings with SEC
The SEC has as many as 40 filings with different deadlines to reach a decision on futures-linked products. It seems they have no choice but to approve at least some. The future is here.
To approve filings, the regulator is not required to take any formal action. If they do not explicitly instruct the issuer to withdraw the filing or ask for changes, the mandated deadline passes and the filing becomes effective under federal law. According to Bloomberg, filings by Invesco and ProShares might be approved under this law next week.
Bitcoin value up 30% in October
As Invezz reported, the premiere crypto’s value rose by 30% this month alone, while network user activity has increased 19% to 284,179, according to data provided by Glassnode. This is measured by the seven-day average of the number of active entities or, as defined by Glassnode, a “cluster of addresses controlled by the same network entity.”
Its dominance is now 45%, the highest it’s been since August according to data of CoinMarketCap. Large transactions with Bitcoin have never been more numerous than in the past four months.