Sec clears first Bitcoin Etf on Wall Street

And in the end, suffered, tribulated, even hacked, the Sec's yes to the first Wall Street Etf on Bitcoin arrived. On 10 January, as the clock struck 9.50pm in Italy, the Securities Exchange Commission led by Gary Gensler gave the simultaneous green light to the first 11 pending applications for the listing of the physical (collateralised) Etf (passive fund) on the spot (market) price of Bitcoin.

Hot on its heels, Bitcoin's share price rebounded to above $46,000, with the capitalisation of the world's first cryptocurrency returning to the $1 trillion area. It remains to be seen whether the enthusiasm will continue or whether the "sell the news" will be triggered in the coming sessions, if most of those who have ridden the powerful rise in recent months (+90% since September) precisely on the expectation of this news decide to monetise and take home the profit. But in any case this is, from a fundamentals point of view, a milestone for Bitcoin that some compare to what happened to physical gold in 2004 when the first Etf pegged to the yellow metal arrived on Wall Street.

Among the 11 investment houses involved is BlackRock, the world's number one with assets under management totalling $10 trillion. It is precisely the stance taken by this investment house - which prior to this request by the SEC had received 575 'yes' votes out of 576 applications for ETFs - that has gradually convinced investors that this could be the right time. The SEC has been receiving applications for Bitcoin ETFs for some time now (the first was in 2018 by VanEck, which is also among those that received approval yesterday), but until now it had always rejected them. This time, the SEC, by asking for numerous additional documents from the issuers, has broken the deadlock by clearing Bitcoin's entry on Wall Street. For the sake of accuracy, it must be said that products pegged to the cryptocurrency already exist on Wall Street, but they are futures contracts (authorised in December 2017) and technically very different from a physical ETF that replicates the spot price and thus obliges issuers to buy collateral as demand grows. But net of these technicalities, the most significant effect concerns the change of narrative associated with Bitcoin. From "money laundering currency" (as BlackRock CEO Larry Fink of BlackRock described it a few years ago) to "digital gold" (Fink's own words at the end of 2023).

This approval will also go down in the annals of finance for the murder mystery of Tuesday evening, when on Gary Gensler's 'X' profile the announcement about the Etf approval was published. Except for a denial by the Sec itself, indicating that the account had been 'compromised'. Crypto-investors lived through a day of trepidation between highs and lows as the publication of the tweet by what appears to be a hacker (we await the outcome of the investigation) cost dearly to many traders who had already set orders to ride the volatility that were swept away by the market accusing aggregate losses of at least 90 million dollars.

Will traders fooled by the Sec account, itself fooled by a hacker, be able to sue tomorrow? What if the victim was not the Etf on Bitcoin but a large company already listed on Wall Street? Questions that may never be answered. Because after all, the world's most talked-about Etf has been a reality for a few hours now.