News Headline Highlights
- On the 29th of December, most spot BTC ETF applicants filed their final S-1’s (prospectus’). It is now expected that the SEC approves these applications in the next 9 days. Most notably from the filings:
- Many named Authorised Participants (APs) they’ve entered into agreements with, the final requirement before launch.
- Named APs include JP Morgan, Jane Street, Virtu and Cantor Fitzgerald. Magnet quick take: It’s pretty comical to see JP Morgan as a named and signed AP for BlackRock and Invesco/Galaxy given Jamie Dimon’s vocal bashing of Bitcoin. As the saying goes, watch what they do, not what they say…
- Bitwise has announced a $200m seed from an unnamed source, significantly more than the $10m BlackRock has announced.
- Many shared their fee schedules, with fees varying from 0.39% to 0.8% of AUM.
- Galaxy/Invesco announced zero fees for the first 6 months.
- Fidelity came in with the lowest Sponsor fee of 0.39%.
- BlackRock have not shared their fee schedule yet.
- The US Securities and Commission Exchange (SEC) may notify spot Bitcoin ETF applicants of approval as early as Wednesday (tomorrow!) or Thursday, ahead of a possible Jan. 10 launch, according to a Reuters report.
- Van Eck joined Bitwise and Hashdex in the Bitcoin ETF marketing race, launching their own commercial last week.
- MicroStrategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, added another 14,620 BTC, for ~$615.7m, in December. MicroStrategy now owns almost 1% of all BTC in circulation, valued at nearly $8B.
- Barry Silbert resigned as chairman of Grayscale, the world’s largest crypto asset manager, and will be replaced by Mark Shifke. Magnet quick take - this has mostly been interpreted as a strategic move to improve the odds of Grayscale being approved to launch a BTC ETF in the US. Barry is also the CEO of Digital Currency Group (DCG) who are currently under investigation by the New York Attorney General for fraud.
- Sam Bankman-Fried has had his remaining charges dropped, including foreign bribery and bank fraud charges. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer and much of the crypto community, have condemned the decision by prosecutors not to try Bankman-Fried on a charge of unlawful political donations.
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