ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood Says if the SEC Approves a Bitcoin Spot ETF, It Will Likely Greenlight More Than One

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood thinks the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will decide on multiple Bitcoin (BTC) spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) at the same time.

In a new interview with Bloomberg Television, Wood says the SEC decision date for ARK’s 21Shares Bitcoin spot ETF application, currently scheduled for August 13th, will likely be extended.

“I think the SEC, if it’s going to approve a Bitcoin ETF, will approve more than one at once… because most of these essentially will be the same, and it will come down to marketing, communicating the message.”

No US Bitcoin spot ETF applications have been greenlit thus far, though the crypto world eagerly awaits the SEC’s decision on a June application from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.

Previously decided Bitcoin spot ETF applications, including an earlier application from ARK, have all been denied, though the SEC did approve the launch of the first Bitcoin futures ETFs in October 2021.

Crypto asset manager Grayscale was behind one of the denied ETF applications, though the firm announced in June that it was suing the SEC over that decision, calling it “discriminatory.”

Wood says in her new interview that she believes the SEC will lose the Grayscale case.

“How can you approve a Bitcoin futures ETF and not a Bitcoin ETF? And in fact, if you’re really thinking about consumer protection, a futures ETF is swaps space, so there’s a counterparty risk there that you would not have with a Bitcoin ETF, which is backed 1:1 with Bitcoin in Coinbase’s cold storage. It still confounds me.”

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