The US Securities and Exchange Commission has approved 11 Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications, with trading to begin later today, Jan 11. 2024.

11 Spot Bitcoin ETFs Officially Approved

The regulator gave the green light to the following products (and their ticker symbols):

In a bid to appeal to investors, many issuers such as BlackRock slashed fees ahead of the SEC’s green light.

In a statement, SEC Chair Gensler gave the official approval.

He said:

Today, the Commission approved the listing and trading of a number of spot bitcoin exchange-traded product (ETP) shares

Notably, the SEC appears to have approved the ETFs begrudgingly, noting that the ETF approvals are in no way an endorsement of Bitcoin, the asset.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that the Commission failed to adequately explain its reasoning in disapproving the listing and trading of Grayscale’s proposed ETP (the Grayscale Order). The court therefore vacated the Grayscale Order and remanded the matter to the Commission. Based on these circumstances and those discussed more fully in the approval order, I feel the most sustainable path forward is to approve the listing and trading of these spot bitcoin ETP shares.

• “Importantly, today’s Commission action is cabined to ETPs holding one non-security commodity, bitcoin. It should in no way signal the Commission’s willingness to approve listing standards for crypto asset securities.”
• “While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse bitcoin. Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with bitcoin and products whose value is tied to crypto,” he added.

SEC’s Commissioner Hester M. Peirce also released a statement, saying that these ETPs could have been approved years ago.

We squandered a decade of opportunities to do our job. If we had applied the standard we use for other commodity-based ETPs, we could have approved these products years ago, but we refused to do so until a court called our bluff.

The approvals mark the beginning of a sea-change in how Bitcoin and blue chip assets are accessed in traditional finance. With these 11 products approved for the number one digital commodity, expectations for Litecoin ETF listings, and other assets, besides Grayscale’s LTCN (Trust) are growing.

As an extra bit of trivia, the ETF approvals happened precisely 15 years after Hal Finney – an early computer scientist who many speculate could have been Satoshi – started running Bitcoin.

Poetic.

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