By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
VanEck director Gabor Gurbacs said that the company is firm in its decision to get “a liquid, insured and appropriately regulated physical bitcoin ETF” in the market.
Last Thursday, on September, the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) further delayed its ruling on CBOE Bitcoin ETF. The securities watchdog sought for more public input and comments. The next deadline for this decision is now moved to December 29, 2018.
This is the second delay since the CBOE filed for Bitcoin ETF with the SEC on June 20, 2018. The CBOE Bitcoin ETF proposal was put forward by Vaneck Solidx Bitcoin Trust (“the Trust”) – a partnership between financial services company SolidX and investment firm VanEck.
According to a particular section called “proceedings to determine whether registration should be denied” of the U.S law governing the SEC, the agency can take its final decision from 180 days of the proposal. The VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF proposal was first published in the Federal Register on the 2nd of July, 2018.
In a recent word with CoinDesk, Gabor Gurbacs – the director of digital asset strategy for VanEck – said that he very much “expected” the latest delay coming from the SEC. Gurbacs further reiterated that the company is firm in its decision to get “a liquid, insured and appropriately regulated physical bitcoin ETF” in the market.
SolidX CEO Dan Gallancy reaffirmed his stand saying the latest delay in the decision has not caused any change in the outlook of the proposal. Eric Balchunas, a senior ETF analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, told that the order looked “like more of the same in terms of seeking comment and asking questions regarding some of their major concerns.”
There are high-hopes pinned on the arrival of CBOE Bitcoin ETF. Not only crypto enthusiasts but big players from the global financial market are eagerly looking towards it. In August, the SEC, in one shot, rejected a total of nine Bitcoin ETFs from Direxion, GraniteShares and ProShares, saying that they were not competitive enough to handle market manipulation. The decision was later taken into reconsideration by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce.
However, the VanEck-SolidX proposal is fundamentally different considering that it is “physically-backed” by Bitcoin tokens which will be held in the repository by the Trust. After the SEC raised come “core questions” over the past rejections, Gurbacs said that those are already “appropriately answered” in the VanEck-SolidX proposal.
He stated: “[The SEC] just needs time to understand the markets better … We have answered pretty much every question that was asked and especially the 18 questions … around liquidity, pricing, market manipulation, it’s all part of our application how we address that.”