Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
When the Securities and Exchange Commission denied Grayscale its petition for a Bitcoin ETF, that action was “arbitrary and capricious,” an appeals court ruled today. The SEC ruling has been vacated.
Last year, Grayscale applied for the approval for the fund and was denied. An ETF, or exchange-traded fund, is a pooled investment that is tied to a specific set of assets, which might be an index, a sector, a set of commodities, or something else. Grayscale’s is “something else” — Bitcoin. That could let large investors, such as pension funds, invest in Bitcoin.
The SEC has previously approved ETFs that track Bitcoin futures, but not so-called spot ETFs, which directly track Bitcoin price. Grayscale wanted to convert its Bitcoin trust to…