Hopes for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) took a slight hit over the weekend after Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), called BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s applications “inadequate”.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Gensler has reservations about how these Big Money titans will manage surveillance-sharing agreements.
Given that mass institutional interest in bitcoin in recent weeks has been the main catalyst for bitcoin’s impressive bull run above US$30,000, it would have been reasonable to see a fall in spot prices as sentiment soured.
Yet, despite some pretty wild volatility on Friday, the BTC/USDT pair remains in a strong position at US$30,600, having only briefly dipped below the 30k support line over the weekend.
Can bitcoin break above 31k again? – Source: currency.com
The pair appears to be trading sideways between 30k and 31k, where the majority of price action has occurred for the past 10 days.
In fact, bitcoin sentiment appears strong by most metrics, Note that Gensler did not flatly rule out a spot bitcoin ETF, which would open bitcoin to billions of dollars of new investor money.
According to the Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index, investor sentiment is very much in the bullish category.
This could be down to the diplomatic tone coming from the SEC; BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) is likely to try again with Gensler’s stipulations in mind.
Open interest in bitcoin futures has taken a hit though, falling from US$10.4bn at the tail end of last week to US$9.7bn today.
With a few headwinds blowing across bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH) has steered ahead, with the ETH/USDT pair surging to US$1,960 following a bullish weekend.
Week on week, ETH is up nearly 4% while BTC is up less than one percent.
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