Two commissioners at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are putting their own agency on blast after the regulator batted down another Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) application.
The SEC on Friday rejected a Bitcoin spot ETF application from VanEck, a US-based ETF and fund manager.
Unlike Bitcoin futures ETF, which would be linked to derivative contracts tied to BTC, a spot Bitcoin ETF would be directly backed by the benchmark cryptocurrency.
SEC Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda released a statement accusing their own agency of holding Bitcoin spot ETF applications to a “bespoke standard that may be impossible for any product to meet.”
“Nearly six years have passed since the Commission issued, via authority delegated to the Division of Trading and Markets, its first order disapproving an application by an exchange to list and trade an exchange-traded product (‘ETP’) designed to track the price of spot Bitcoin. Notwithstanding the significant evolution of the Bitcoin market, the Commission has continued to disapprove every such filing that has come before it. In our view, the Commission is using a different set of goalposts from those it used – and still uses – for other types of commodity-based ETPs to keep these spot Bitcoin ETPs off the exchanges we regulate.”
Peirce and Uyeda say the application rejections have harmed the Bitcoin market in the US by preventing it from institutionalizing and becoming safer.
“Because we believe that spot Bitcoin ETPs should be subject to the same standards the Commission has used for every other type of commodity-based ETP and because we believe the poorly designed test being used here is not fit for purpose and will inhibit innovation – and thereby harm investors – in our markets, we dissent.”
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