Cathie Wood ARK Invest is one of the companies that has applied to the SEC for approval to issue a spot Bitcoin ETF on the US markets.
Indeed, as revealed by Bloomberg Intelligence, ARK’s application is the first on which the SEC will be forced to issue a verdict.
SEC: Cathie Wood upcoming ETF expiration
In fact, the SEC, as usual, is taking its time to be able to rule on the matter, but there are technical deadlines beyond which it cannot go.
Foremost among these is 10 January 2024, which is the final deadline by which it must necessarily rule on the application to issue the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF in the US markets.
Although it is not 100% certain that the SEC will approve such an application, many hopefuls give the approval as 90% possible, partly because it seems that the SEC no longer has any excuse not to approve such an application.
In this regard, Cathie Wood herself recently stated publicly that the likelihood of approval of their application has increased as the SEC has made a commitment to ARK itself and BlackRock.
It refers to the fact that, for the first time since it began receiving such applications, the SEC has responded and interacted with the applicants by providing them with feedback suitable for improving their application so as to make it more approvable.
The approval of ETFs
Therefore, the odds are even stronger that by the first half of January the SEC will end up approving spot Bitcoin ETFs on the US markets.
Not least because it is unlikely to approve only the single expiring ARK application.
In fact, should it do so, it would give an undue advantage to the issuer, vis-à-vis its competitors, so much so that many argue that approval should happen en masse.
That is, since the agency has received several such applications, if there were more than one with all the requirements to be approved it would most likely approve all the approvable ones at the same time.
Given that ARK’s to date does indeed seem approvable, but BlackRock’s should be as well, bulk approval remains the most credible assumption.
The reasons for past rejections
But Wood wanted to go further, and she also suggested a reason, far from honorable, that may have prompted the SEC to oppose these kinds of requests in the past.
It should be recalled that a court ruling came in late August condemning this attitude of the SEC, and indeed it has changed profoundly since then. It has moved from total rejection to full cooperation, so perhaps the SEC waited until it was forced to do so before it decided to do so.
Wood argues that the reason the current SEC chairman, Gary Gensler, had always refused to approve spot Bitcoin ETFs was his personal ambitions to become Secretary of the Treasury.
Indeed, it should be noted that the SEC could not oppose the approval of applications to issue ETFs in the U.S. market based on BTC price futures, because these in turn had been previously approved by the CFTC.
Instead, it has always opposed the approval of ETFs directly collateralized in BTC, although the judge who issued the ruling in late August clearly revealed that the legal reasons for this are not understood.
So there would not be legal motivations behind this choice, but political ones. And perhaps those motives can be traced to Gensler’s personal interests, according to Wood’s statement.
The cryptocurrency problem
It should not be forgotten that the current US government is Democratic, and Gensler belongs to the Democratic mainstream, as he was chairman of the CFTC during Obama’s Democratic government.
During the Republican presidency of Donald Trump, on the other hand, he did not have any government post.
The current Treasury Secretary is Janet Yellen, and perhaps Gensler aspires to replace her in case of a Democratic victory in next year’s elections.
The fact is that at this moment in history, Democrats are aligned against the crypto world, while Republicans seem to be more in favor.
In 2018, when he had no government roles and was teaching at the prestigious MIT in Boston, Gensler praised Bitcoin.
This not only confirms Wood’s hypothesis that he knows Bitcoin very well, but also that his opposition has no deep-seated motivations, but perhaps only extemporaneous ones related to the precise political moment he is experiencing.
Perhaps therefore he waited for a court to enjoin him to approve such requests in order to avoid antagonizing the Democratic Party widely arrayed against the crypto world.
Cathie Wood prediction about the SEC’s approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF
Wood also stated that the crypto market could grow to be worth $25 trillion ($25 trillion) in 2030.
According to some estimates this would imply a Bitcoin price of about $650,000, which moreover turns out to be in line with PlanB’s stock-to-flow model projections, for example.
It should be pointed out, however, that Wood at this time has every interest in promoting the future purchase of his spot Bitcoin ETF shares once approved, so this prediction is by no means to be considered objective.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2023/11/16/cathie-wood-increased-chances-sec-approving-etf/