It’s big. But Wall Street wants it to be even bigger. POLITICO’s Kellie Mejdrich reports on an effort to open up access to Bitcoin investment.
In addition to pending fund proposals backed by Fidelity and Scaramucci’s SkyBridge, One River Digital Asset Management is being advised by former SEC Chair Jay Clayton as it pitches a “carbon neutral” Bitcoin ETF. Clayton led the agency in the Trump era and didn’t sign off on any of the cryptocurrency fund proposals during his tenure. While in office, Clayton highlighted concerns that cryptocurrency markets were ripe for fraud and manipulation and said that regulators had a host of issues to resolve before permitting ETFs.
The SEC, which is responsible for allowing the funds to launch, appears to be in no hurry to expand access to Bitcoin investments. The agency’s new chair, Gary Gensler, has emerged in recent weeks as a clear crypto skeptic. That surprised some advocates who were hoping he’d be more amenable to Bitcoin after teaching and researching digital finance at MIT.
Gensler has flagged fundamental concerns about the operations of the underlying cryptocurrency market that the ETFs want to track. He says exchanges that facilitate the buying and selling of digital currency aren’t adequately regulated and that market data is lacking.
“Altogether, this has led to substantially less investor protection than in our traditional securities markets, and to correspondingly greater opportunities for fraud and…
