At one point he commented, “[Bitcoin] has been and could continue to be a catalyst for change in the fields of finance and money.”
Elsewhere, Gensler issued new remarks that shed light on how the SEC may act on the many exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposals now up for review by the agency, signaling that those based on Bitcoin futures may have the highest chance of approval.
“Given these important protections, I look forward to the staff’s review of such filings, particularly if those are limited to these CME-traded bitcoin futures,” he said.
... this figures, the only ETF to get approval will be based on fiat cash-settled futures trading only. This way they can keep manipulating btc price and price expectations without risking value escaping the fiat pyramid scheme with runaway retail demand for exposure to btc upside, i.e. a btc-backed ETF.
Yes, that's probably correct. As far my understanding of an ETF goes, if it is based on the spot market, then it is like buying the underlying asset and keeping it on behalf of the ETF holder. But if it is based on a derivate market then the ETF holder is allowing the company to make long/short positions insted of him doing so in CME. So IMO an ETF based on a derivate market is a nonsense. The thing is that SEC trusts regulated exchanges like CME and they don't trust fully Coinbase, not to mention Binance and the asian exchanges. We've seen plenty attempts of whales to manipulate the market in the past indeed. But the funny thing is that nowadays only CME companies have the resources to manipulate the market and they are doing it constantly unfortunately. SEC created so many rules, and yet just under their nose Maydoff developed a huge ponzi stealing $50 bil from almost all banks and Wall Street companies. The average Joes who trusted their brokers/funds, etc., were called by the phone one day that all their money has gone, because their fund invested everything in the company of the creator of Nasdaq - Maydoff. Is this custormers protection and KYC what looks like? Nothing has changed since then! But surely, some shadowy coders and money launderers are manipulating the price which is formed on the biggest exchange Binance with daily Bitcoin trading volume $2-16 bil. Only Wall Street companies can do that and there is a lot of proof they are doing it using exactly CME. Ironic, isn't it?
Anyway, after approving CME's ETF, the next step should be approving Grayscale's ETF. If SEC want to be overly cautious, let them take one step at a time. The truth is the institutions will find one way or another to get real Bitcoins, so an ETF is more like "buy the rumour sell the news" kinda thing. The latter it comes, the better. I wouldn't mind if SEC will change their mind when the price is >10x from now. This will give us more time to accumulate at the current extremely low prices, thanks to CME manipulators.
