Valkyrie Bitcoin Trust aka Valkyrie Digital Assets applied to open a bitcoin ETF. According to Dallas-based Valkyrie Investments, Valkyrie Digital Assets’ parent company, the Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Coinbase Custody Trust Company will act as custodian of the proposed ETF.
Leah Wald, CEO of Valkyrie Investments, said: “Our executive team has previously launched several ETFs, publicly-traded funds and ETPs, including bitcoin funds.”
Wald explains that the ETF team includes Stephen McCleurge and John Key, who have worked together on over 100 new, regulatory-reviewed trades. In late December, VanEck re-applied to the SEC for the VanEck Bitcoin Trust ETF.
While ETFs are considered profitable because they trade in the stock market in much the same way as stocks in popular companies such as Apple and Microsoft, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected Bitcoin ETF offers over the years due to concerns about volatility.
In August 2018, nine such proposals were rejected on the same day. However, there have been indications that the SEC is favouring this idea. In October 2020, then-chairman Jay Clayton, considered by many to be indifferent to cryptocurrency, said the agency was still open to review ETF proposals.
Now that the new administration has called for changing the guard at the SEC, cryptocurrency proponents are hoping for such an ETF to be approved in 2021. Clayton formally resigned last month and was replaced by Gary Gensler, who is considered by many to be more crypto-minded than his predecessor.
Also adding to the optimism is the departure this month of Dahlia Blass, director of investment management at the SEC. Blass authored a 2018 letter to the SEC expressing concern that the bitcoin market is not large enough or liquid enough to be ready for an exchange-traded product.