Canada Approves Bitcoin ETF, Options Markets Are Not Listing $ 100K BTC

Editor’s Note: Welcome to the year of the ox. Blockchain Bites will not be published on President’s Day, Monday, February 15.

The first bitcoin exchange-traded fund in North America has been approved by the Canadian securities regulator, a move that some commentators say opens the door for the US to follow. The US government was hesitant to approve a bitcoin ETF product, which tracks bitcoin’s price and trades on a stock exchange, due to bitcoin’s supposedly shallow liquidity and the risks that it could be actively manipulated.

Bitcoin miners made a record $ 4.06 million in just 60 minutes yesterday, according to data from Glassnode. Most of that revenue came from the bitcoin subsidy – 6.25 BTC is spent roughly every 10 minutes – although about $ 47,000 in network fees were collected.

Bitcoin options market sees a 12% chance that prices will rise above USD 100,000 by the end of December, according to a mathematical measure called the Black Scholes formula. Strike prices, call option prices, actual assets and US Treasurys are considered to determine the fair price of an option contract.

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said the payment giant wants to become a CBDC distributor if ever a central bank digital currency is launched. ‘You think about how much [digital wallets] we will have the next two, three or five years, and we are a perfect complement to central banks and governments to spread those digitized forms of currency, ”said Schulman at the company’s investor day.

Wall Street suits are pressuring their employers to switch to crypto, according to CNBC. In response to internal inquiries, JPMorgan Chase co-chair Daniel Pinto said the bank would consider trading bitcoin if customer demand was “there,” and “I’m sure it will happen one day.”

Mayor of Miami Francis Suarez has driven everything from a treasury for bitcoin cities to paying workers in the crypto. Yesterday, however, city commissioners stepped on the brakes on these ambitious plans to first study their impact. Commissioners voted to launch awareness campaigns in English, Spanish and Creole to educate people about crypto.

Figure Technologies, a blockchain loan startup, involves setting up a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), also called a “blank check” company. The company, Figure Acquisition Corp. I, will raise $ 250 million to get a competitive startup audience.

Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on Thursday that it has put plans to regulate cryptocurrencies on hold in light of the central bank’s decision to ban them, according to a report by the Guardian Nigeria. This follows a rally yesterday where the Senate of Nigeria called on the country’s major financial regulators to discuss the bill, which was publicly pushed back.

India is giving crypto holders a three to six month window to cash out, if a proposed cryptocurrency ban goes through. The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, launched this year, seeks to restrict private currencies in the country and establish a framework for a national digital currency.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Friday that he will partner with rapper Jay-Z and donate 500 bitcoin (~ $ 23.6 million) to create a new endowment fund supporting Africa and India. Separately, Dorsey donated $ 1 million to Coin Center think tank on the cryptocurrency policy, announced Wednesday.

Pop bubbles?
Former CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo cleared the record on CoinDesk TV this morning regarding the role of the commodity regulator in the emergence of the 2017 bitcoin bull market.

CoinDesk previously reported that the Trump administration acted to pierce the 2017 bubble by paving the way for futures products.

“We saw a bubble formation and we thought the best way to go about this was to let the market interact with it,” Giancarlo said in late 2019. He said the launch of bitcoin futures “would have the impact of doing so. the bitcoin bubble. And it worked. “

These comments have sparked a conspiracy that US regulators are antagonistic to the growth of the cryptocurrency industry. Similar questions arose earlier this week, after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched the country’s first regulated ether futures (ETH).

Giancarlo tempered these fears this morning. In addition, security and commodity regulators do not have the authority or the ability to have such a heavy hand in the capital markets.

The story is a bit more complicated. According to Giancarlo, derivatives are an essential part of a mature market.

“The ability to go short in a market is an essential maturation point in the development of any market,” he said, adding that asset prices in most modern markets are not set in spot markets, but at a higher financial level. “The institutional role in bitcoin has made it a true investment grade asset.”

To the extent that bitcoin futures cleared the bubble, it was just a matter of good old capitalist pricing.

[Derivatives] brought the price of bitcoin back in correlation with the fundamental cost of production, ”said Giancarlo. “In 2017, bitcoin broke out of those fundamentals.”

So what does Giancarlo think about today’s frothy markets? He did not answer the question directly, but we can go back to the market itself.

As CoinDesk market reporter Omkar Godbole noted, derivatives traders see a low likelihood that the market will inflate the past six digits by the end of the year.

“With the extreme volatility of the past two months, the market isn’t showing much conviction about how bitcoin will trade for the rest of the year,” Sui Chung, CEO of CF Benchmarks, told Godbole.