Over the past few months, most members of the cryptocurrency community have been salivating at the potential approval of a flurry of spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETF) filed to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, don’t get your hopes up too much because BitGo CEO Mike Belshe just gave his bleak prediction of what may be in store for the pending applications on the table of the regulator.
Brace Yourselves for Bitcoin ETF Rejections
In an interview with Bloomberg, the BitGo boss stated that the SEC will “quite likely” reject all the spot Bitcoin ETF filings. The head of the Palo Alto-based digital asset trust company said that the regulator might justify its move on the basis that exchanges and custody are not separated. He may have a good point for this as a number of the applicants have elected Coinbase as the custody partner of their ETFs.
Belshe clarified that while Coinbase is in no way another FTX in the making, the company appears to be operating based on the same playbook that Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) presented 15 months ago in Congress when the fallen CEO of the doomed crypto exchange proposed his “seven key points of regulation.” It was in that instance wherein SBF lobbied for involvement in all the functions he proposed for the sake of efficiency.
For the BitGo CEO, Coinbase must take a great deal of effort to keep its exchange and custody entities apart in the eyes of the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) to give way for spot Bitcoin ETF approvals.
At the end of the interview, Belshe took the opportunity to plug his company as the key to the spot Bitcoin ETF predicament. He explained BitGo 100% focuses on digital asset custody and it does not do any trading or exchange, hence, it could fill the missing piece of the puzzle towards the Bitcoin ETF filing approvals.
The full interview of Belshe last Friday can be viewed here:
Bitcoin Price Now
As of this writing at 4:00 PM UTC time, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at the $36,140 bracket, showing a dip by 1% in the 24-hour frame. The same period also saw trading volume dive by 19% to $24.2 billion. Over the same span, the premier cryptocurrency in market dominance swung between $35,545 low to $36,646 high.
As reported by my colleague earlier, the highest price of BTC last week was at $37,975 during Wednesday. However, the momentum eventually faded as the digital asset tanked back to $35,000.
With that said, were there other factors at play during the botched rally? Some argue that market manipulation may have been a deterrence for Bitcoin gaining another major high this year.
