Crypto news: VanEck has submitted an amended version of its application for the issuance of the VanEck Bitcoin Trust ETF.
The start of purchases
Slowly all those who have filed with the SEC for approval of their own Bitcoin spot ETF are updating it in light of the agency’s comments.
However, this case seems to have a peculiarity.
In fact, according to what has been analyzed by attorney Scott Johnsson, it would appear that the seeding of the fund may be done directly in Bitcoin, and not in dollars.
Seeding is used to finance the establishment of the fund and the issuance of the first shares, and consists in cases like this in the purchase of the underlying.
The underlying of these ETFs are directly BTC, and in the case of seeding done in dollars the company managing the fund must use them to buy BTC in the market.
In contrast in this case it seems that BTC will be used directly for seeding, that is, the collateral will not be purchased in the market but immobilized by someone who already owns it.
Therefore, if in the case of the other spot Bitcoin ETFs the managers will have to go ahead and buy BTC in order to issue the shares, in the specific case of VanEck it seems that it will not be necessary to buy them.
In fact, one investor already purchased an initial block of 50,000 shares of the ETF, the so-called Seed Creation Basket, in October, paying directly in Bitcoin.
Crypto news: the timeline for approval of VanEck’s Bitcoin ETF
The assumption that has been circulating for some time now is that the SEC will end up approving all applications for spot Bitcoin ETFs that will qualify for issuance all together.
Moreover, such approval is given at least 90% probable by now, and is expected to take place by 10 January.
Typically however in these cases the SEC has always taken as much time as possible to be able to deliberate, so many believe that approval could come either in early January, or at the latest in late December.
However, it is clear that the managers of these ETFs are already preparing to launch them on the market as soon as possible.
It is no coincidence, for example, that BlackRock’s has also already been listed on the DTCC platform, although it is obviously not yet on the markets.
VanEck and the latest news on the Bitcoin ETF
VanEck is not only an asset manager founded in New York in 1955, but ETFs make up more than 75% of the total assets it has under management.
Therefore, it can be said to be a company that specializes in ETFs.
It was one of the first to launch a gold ETF in the US, and it has been interested in Bitcoin since 2017.
For example, in November 2020, before the last big bullrun began, it launched an ETN on Bitcoin in the European markets, which to date has had a total return of 104%.
This is a BTC collateralized fund, and although it is not an ETF in the strict sense of the word, it is not all that different from the one about to launch in the U.S. market.
The net assets of this Bitcoin ETN are over $210 million, and it is traded on the Frankfurt exchange, the Zurich exchange, and Euronext Amsterdam and Paris.
Of all the traditional companies that have applied to the SEC for permission to issue an ETF on Bitcoin spot on US exchanges, it is one of those with the most experience in crypto markets.
In addition to ETNs on Bitcoin, it has also launched many others, on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and even Algorand, Chainlink, and Avalanche.
Bitcoin’s role
Bitcoin, however, now stands apart from all other assets, including crypto assets.
This is why it has attracted so much attention even from traditional asset managers such as BlackRock.
In fact, ETNs on BTC are of much more interest to traditional financial markets than other crypto ETNs. For example, the VanEck Ethereum ETN has almost three times less equity than the VanEck Bitcoin ETN, and the one on Solana almost twenty times less.
Then again, even ETH’s own market capitalization on crypto markets is three times less than that of BTC, and perhaps the comparison of market capitalizations is already enough to understand that Bitcoin is something different than altcoins. To date, the market capitalization of Bitcoin alone is larger than the sum of all the market capitalizations of all other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum and stablecoins such as USDT.