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Reviewing the big crypto headlines in 2024, we journalists are always on the lookout for follow-ups. Many should come in this new year.
You know about demand for the US spot bitcoin and ether ETFs that hit the market last year. But whether we’ll see similar US funds holding other crypto assets (i.e. solana, XRP) is a big question for 2025.
And who will be the biggest new adopters of the existing BTC and ETH offerings? We know plenty of pension funds, wealth managers and other institutions still sit on the sidelines.
Remember, too, how Morgan Stanley advisers started being able to pitch bitcoin ETFs to certain clients? We’ll continue to watch out for such developments from other wirehouses.
Oh yeah, and will Vanguard change its closed-off stance on crypto? Signs point to it taking longer than 2025 before that happens. One more: will Schwab launch a spot crypto ETF?
Moving on, Donald Trump’s crypto promises are well documented. But what exactly his nomination of Paul Atkins as SEC chair will mean, and whether a US bitcoin reserve is established, remains to be seen.
Could the SEC rescind SAB121? And if so, how quickly? Getting rid of that guidance appears a potential easy, quick win for a new agency administration, Ava Labs deputy general counsel Wee Ming Choon told me last month.
We’re also on the lookout for progress around FIT21 and US stablecoin legislation.
“It feels like folks in Congress understand these two items are a big priority, and there’s been so much done and debated over the past 18 months that hopefully there’s enough to go on,” Choon said.
While the US fell behind other regions implementing crypto regulatory frameworks, action on these items would turn that upside-down, he added.
“We’ve had lots of jurisdictions around the world who have put in place consultation papers, got all the feedback, [established] laws and amended laws,” Choon said. “I think they’ll look at what the US is doing and probably have to tweak their regimes.”
Rep. French Hill today named Allison Behuniak as policy director of the House Financial Services Committee. She was most recently staff director of the digital assets subcommittee — a promising sign.
There is also the chance for more crypto firms going public this year. We’re looking at you, Circle, Kraken and Figure Technologies.
And aside from BlackRock so far dominating the spot crypto ETF space, the company launched a tokenized money market fund in March. Franklin Templeton launched a similar offering in 2021. Combined, the funds have roughly $1.2 billion in assets.
We’ll see if some projections of the RWA tokenization segment growing 10x (to about $50 billion) this year were too bullish — or not enough. We’ve heard it will depend on institutions seeing enough value in the emerging use cases.
The bottom line: 2025 will tell us a lot about the crypto space’s trajectory — on these topics and well beyond.