Bitcoin’s uninterrupted growth in recent weeks has sent numerous enthusiasts declaring this moment as history in making, and on Tuesday, October 19, they will be vindicated.
ProShares is launching a long-awaited exchange-traded fund (ETF) on New York Stock Exchange tied to Bitcoin futures, according to intial report from The New York Times.
In case you missed it, Bitcoin has entered the New York Stock exchange for the 1st time, allowing investors the option to invest in cryptocurrency without directly holding it, via conventional broker accounts.
The New York Stock Exchange is preparing for Bitcoin
“2021 will be remembered for this mile-stone,” said ProShares CEO Michael Sapir, in the NYTimes report. This signals that investors have grown curious about crypto, but remain he-sitant to directly buy un-regulated crypto exchanges. Now they will have” convenient-access to Bitcoin in a wrapper that has market-integrity,” added Sapir. Entrepreneurs & traditional finance enterprises interested in crypto have wanted this for nearly a decade, trying to acquire authorization to launch Bitcoin ETFs in United States, but operations have been continually delayed or outright denied by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Several of these applications are still pending to this day.
Bitcoin futures ETF is not everything that deep crypto suckers, since some want a fund that directly holds crypto. The SEC Chair Gary Gensler recently said agency could allow ETFs based-on futures, which are bets on fluctua-tions of Bitcoin price rather of the crypto itself, which trade on a heavily regulated exchange. But, since the ProShares ETF based-on Bitcoin futures (which, in turn, is traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the SEC won’t announce it. Rather, ProShares’ final position saw no opposing push back in hours approaching the deadline, and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is formerly preparing for the launch on Tuesday.
Critics remain skeptical of digital currencies
It’s not a simple task to quote Bitcoin’s true price, according to Sapir in the report, since there’s no single market reference one can rely-on, & prices may appear different by over to 5 percent depending on which exchange one considers. But, it’s not entirely beyond the pale that futures prices featured on Chicago exchange could reflect a more accurate price of Bitcoin than other spots of exchange, according to numerous analysts. And, according to Sapir, it might be that the fund linked to futures is actually a Bitcoin ETF, indeed if it does not have direct ties to conventional markets. “This is exciting step but not the last,” said Douglas Yones, head of exchange- traded products at the NYSE, in the NYTimes report. Yones thinks a wider-spectrum of ETFs tied to crypto will soon see app-roval, in the long run. But still long it takes for others to reach the NYSE, tomorrow launch is yet another step into legitimacy for crypto, after a year of same steps, including Coinbase, a popular crypto exchange, going public.
While critics of digital currency are still concerned about the comparably high volatility of Bitcoin price (as are controllers), the mass interest in digital-assets from 2020 & 2021 does not appear to be decelerating anytime soon, which means digital currencies will probably come more normalised in coming years.
