A Bloomberg analyst is sharing theories on what motivated the world’s largest investment management company to file for a Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF).
On Thursday, BlackRock filed a request with the SEC for the iShares Bitcoin Trust. The investment vehicle, which is designed to track the underlying market price of BTC, aims to give investors exposure to the leading crypto asset without directly buying it.
In a new interview with Luke Martin, Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas says that the SEC could be favoring institutions like Blackrock to be the key player in the digital asset space rather than crypto exchanges.
“There’s more speculation that the SEC actually wants to push, wants to create winners and losers in this and sort of show that the future is more BlackRock than Binance or crypto exchanges and have BlackRock maybe even drive some of this moving of crypto from the locals to more mainstream companies that have law ears all over, that follow all the rules.
It matches up with the SEC’s recent moves towards some of these exchanges and sort of regulating. Because there’s no real framework yet. They’re more just targeting the problems they see.”
Balchunas says that BlackRock’s move may also be in anticipation of an upcoming resolution of the legal dispute between Grayscale and the SEC, which arose after the regulator denied the digital asset manager’s application to convert its Bitcoin trust into an ETF.
“The other theory is whether BlackRock knows that the SEC might lose the Grayscale case and they’re going to frontrun that or be ready when the case gets lost and then all of a sudden that opens the door to Bitcoin ETFs. That one I’m a little less keen on.”
According to Balchunas, BlackRock has an excellent track record of getting ETFs approved.
“Fun fact: BlackRock’s record of getting ETFs approved by the SEC is 575-1. That’s another reason this is so big. They don’t play around.”
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