The SEC has recently postponed the spot Bitcoin ETF applications of BlackRock, Fidelity, WisdomTree, Invesco & Galaxy, VanEck, Bitwise, and Valkyrie, as initially revealed by Bloomberg ETF analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas.
This marked the initial decision deadline by the SEC in the listing process for these applications since their submission. The deferral has set these applications back by an additional 45 days. The upcoming series of deadlines are now anticipated for mid-October.
Earlier in the week, however, Grayscale triumphed over the SEC in a lawsuit. The outcome resulted in the DC Circuit court of appeals overturning the SEC's rejection of Grayscale's proposal to convert $GBTC into a spot Bitcoin ETF.
This verdict sends the matter back to the SEC, giving the commission a 45-day window to appeal and request an en banc hearing if they choose.
The recent win does not automatically greenlight the conversion of GBTC into a spot Bitcoin ETF. However, it does move the industry closer to the possibility of one being approved by the SEC.
The U.S. court of appeals rejected the SEC's decision for dismissing Grayscale's application, noting, "the Commission neither disputed Grayscale's evidence that the spot and future markets for Bitcoin are 99.9% correlated, nor suggested that market inefficiencies or other factors would undermine the correlation...The Commission’s unexplained discounting of the obvious financial and mathematical relationship between the spot and futures markets falls short of the standard for reasoned decision making."