From Thursday: bitcoin ETF VanEck and SolidX for banks and hedge funds

September promises to be a beautiful month. The course is on fire, on 6 September institutional customers can store their first bitcoin at Bakkt and on 23 September Bakkt will actually go live. And now something nice is coming, starting this week, bitcoin ETFs will be offered, by a trick in the law

Limited variant on ETF

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently bothering. Bitcoin ETFs have not yet been approved. But that does not stop VanEck and SolidX, these two companies want to offer a limited variant this week.

According to an article from today’s Wall Street Journal (behind payment wall), VanEck Securities and SolidX Management are taking an unusual path to bypass legal barriers. They use an exemption from the SEC to be able to offer ETFs from their VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust to institutions such as hedge funds and banks, but not to private investors.

From Thursday already

The Wall Street Journal writes that these two companies are planning to sell these options from Thursday. They do so in accordance with Rule 144A of the SEC, which allows privately placed securities to be traded among qualified institutional buyers. There are shorter holding periods here, but there is no obligation to register this with the SEC.

To date, the SEC has not approved a crypto ETF. Robert Jackson, the SEC commissioner said at the beginning of 2019 that he believes that an ETF proposal will ultimately meet the SEC standards.

Procrastination

On August 12, the SEC postponed a decision on crypto ETFs. This concerned three proposals submitted by Bitwise Asset Management, VanEck / SolidX and Wilshire Phoenix. They all hope to become the first party to offer a bitcoin ETF in the United States. The SEC will return to this later this month and again in October.

This month already seems to bring a lot of good things. Does this also influence the price of bitcoin? It already seems that way.

What is an ETF again?

ETF stands for Exchange Trade Funds. A bitcoin ETF closely follows the course of bitcoin. With an ETF, investors do not have to buy bitcoin directly and do not have to create a wallet, but can indirectly speculate on the price movement. An ETF can also consist of multiple assets. Think of a tech ETF, this is a basket of shares with shares of, for example, Apple, Microsoft, AirBNB and so on.