BlackRock Close To Filing For Bitcoin ETF: Report

After dumping overnight on the latest negative development in what has been a relentless onslaught of bad news for crypto – when South Korean bitcoin lending platforms Delio and Haru announced the temporary suspension of customer withdrawals “in order to safely protect the assets of customers currently in custody” – this morning the crypto space finally got some welcome news when CoinDesk reported that BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, is close to filing an application for a Bitcoin ETF.

According to the report, BlackRock will be using Coinbase Custody for the ETF and the crypto exchange’s spot market data for pricing.

BlackRock began working with Coinbase to make crypto directly available to institutional investors midway through last year.

It wasn’t clear if the ETF will be spot or futures; to date, the Securities and Exchange Commission, led by political activist Gary Gensler whose primary objective is to follow Democrat demand that the US crypto industry be crippled, which oversees ETFs in the U.S., has rejected every application for a spot bitcoin ETF, though it has approved several bitcoin futures ETFs for trading.

The fact that the world’s largest asset manager is again stepping up in the crypto space is a welcome development at a time when the politicized SEC has been weaponized to execute Democrat marching orders to crush the crypto industry in the US (thereby making the future of bitcoin a key issue in the 2024 elections), and comes just one day after the FT reported that in a surprising twist, China appears to also be warming up to crypto after years of crackdowns, and that Hong Kong’s banking regulator is pressuring lenders including HSBC and Standard Chartered to take on crypto exchanges as clients, at a time of unprecedented crackdowns by US regulators on the industry.