Another day, another surge in cryptocurrency prices. Cryptos of all stripes and sizes have been hot with investors lately, and that upward momentum continued on Monday.
In fact, it was hard to find a coin or token that wasn't rising. From the close of business on Friday, meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB +1.18%) was up by over 5%. That actually made it a laggard, as Polygon (MATIC +0.00%) and MultiversX (EGLD +4.20%) had both increased by around 14%. Meanwhile, those two were outpaced by Fantom (FTM +14.06%) and Chainlink (LINK +1.95%), with respective 23% and 35% pops.
A spot crypto ETF is coming... for real, this time (maybe)
Investors might be getting a sense of deja vu, as a similar rally occurred last Monday, too -- and for some of the same reasons.
On that day, a social media posting from a crypto media website stated that financial services powerhouse BlackRock's application to create a spot Bitcoin (BTC +2.06%) exchange-traded fund (ETF) had been approved by regulators. Understandably, investors got excited about this, as such an ETF could theoretically draw in heaps of investors who might be wary of putting money directly into Bitcoin.
That report turned out to be false, but the rally more or less held. Crypto bulls have plenty of other fountains of optimism to draw from these days. These include the belief among some investors that the Federal Reserve is either at or near the end of its interest-rate-hiking campaign, and the decline in yields for the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note from their recent peak.
And, as an enthusiastic salesperson or trader might proclaim, that's not all.
Grayscale might win the spot Bitcoin ETF race
While BlackRock's crypto ETF is still on ice, another spot Bitcoin ETF could be moving forward. On Monday, an appeals court in Washington, D.C., effectively ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had to rescind its rejection of one to be managed by Grayscale Investments. That company had applied to convert its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into an ETF.
This doesn't mean that Grayscale is free and clear to do the crypto ETF shuffle. The SEC still has to make a new ruling, and it could still reject the application on other grounds than those that the court rejected. Top SEC officials continue to be quite resistant to crypto generally, so success for Grayscale is by no means a certainty.
Regardless, Grayscale, BlackRock, and other asset managers hoping to make some coin from crypto ETFs have a lot of support from the investing public. It seems probable that the regulator, however honorable its intentions, won't be able to delay them for long -- particularly given that Grayscale won a favorable court judgment in its ETF conversion case.
All in all, then, these are good times for crypto optimists.
