Bitcoin ETF: What are the next steps?

Asset managers requesting final approval from regulators for a Bitcoin ETF on the spot have until January 8th to submit their revisions. Analysts predict that the trade will begin on the 11th of January. Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas predicts that asset managers will finalize adjustments by the morning of January 8th and pave the way for the launch of a spot Bitcoin ETF on Wall Street.

The adjustments must made by S-1 filings and submitted by 8:00 am Eastern Time, or 13:00 UTC, by the deadline. They must disclose the applicant’s remaining fees and tickers. For instance, BlackRock has not yet made the fees related to its ETF public.

After the markets closed on January 5, exchanges that planned to trade crypto money submitted 19-b4 modification forms. Balchunas informed Cointelegraph that the 19-b4 and S-1 forms are the final procedures before a decision is expected from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Both S-1 and 19b-4 forms will reviewed concurrently, with 19b-4 forms approved first.

Bitcoin ETF: SEC Commissioners’ Vote and Potential Launch Expectations

The SEC commissioners’ vote may be the next step in the decision-making process. The markets are expecting spot Bitcoin ETFs to launch on Wall Street by January 11th, despite the absence of anything on the commission’s public agenda before that date. Balchunas said the SEC might use its policy of delegated authority to make the decision.

“We’re not even sure they’re going to vote. […] They could use something called delegated authority, but we don’t know. There are three options: whether they vote or use delegated authority, which means they must approve it because when they denied the past ones, they didn’t have a vote.”

The smallest model, called Nano comes in two versions: one with 1.8 billion parameters and the other with 3.25 billion. Although Google does not disclose the exact number of parameters in the larger models, GPT-3 has 175 billion, and models in Meta’s Llama 2 family have as many as 65 billion. The parameter counts of the two larger Gemini models are presumably in the same range.

“What they miss […] and if they did address this, I’d give them more respect, is the current ways a person can buy crypto. Everybody can buy crypto now. It’s not like the ETF is making crypto available for the first time. […] I don’t think it carries much weight. I think they just want to sort of be on the record that they hate it.”

 According to Bloomberg’s James Seyffart, the SEC has been denying registration of a spot Bitcoin ETF for the past decade, citing worries about potential market manipulation.