It’s been eight years since the first time that some company applied for an Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) based on Bitcoin in the United States. Finally, this month, after a lot of rejections, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the first long-awaited Bitcoin ETF in the country. As a result, Bitcoin (BTC) seems to be going to a new price record.

The firm behind this financial instrument is ProShares, an American investment provider. The new ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) was approved on October 15. And they released it this October 19 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). With this alternative, the investors can decide not to buy BTC directly but go for the stocks offered by ProShares.   

BITO is a derivative, which means that its shares’ prices are based on another asset. In this case, the ETF tracks Bitcoin futures contracts. The initial price per share was $40 at the beginning of the day, but it ended up at $41 in the afternoon. On its inaugural day, the first U.S. Bitcoin ETF raised over one billion dollars in volume. It’s now historically surpassed only by U.S. Carbon Transition Readiness ETF by BlackRock.

In the expectation of the good news, Bitcoin increased by over 18% in the last week. This means that now is on the edge of a new All-Time-High (ATH), with over $64,000 per coin again. The last one came six months ago, with over $64,800 per coin. Some analysts believe it’ll go further, to highs of over $100,000 per token between 2021 and 2022.

After Bitcoin ETF, Ethereum is following

Ethereum (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, isn’t so far from a new ATH either. It’s increased by over 14% in the last week (+$3,900), and it also has other records. According to Glassnode, this blockchain reached a new ATH in Number of Addresses Holding at least 1 ETH, with over 1,341,789. Besides, it now has over 172.9 million unique addresses and the contract for Ethereum 2.0 reached over 7.96 million ETH.

About Ethereum 2.0, we must remember that the blockchain is in the process to migrate from traditional crypto-mining (PoW) to the greener system Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Last August, Ethereum had its last update (London), and the EIP-1559 was finally activated. This improvement proposal implemented a new system that would transform ETH into a deflationary currency and reduce the gas fees.

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In the future, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see an Ethereum ETF following the Bitcoin ETF. Michael Sonnenshein (Grayscale CEO) believes that the SEC will approve the multiple requests about it sooner or later. Companies that have done these filings include VanEck, Wisdom Tree, Kryptoin, and ProShares itself.


Featured Image by Marinefreex from Pixabay


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Author

I'm a literature professional in the crypto world since 2016. It doesn't sound very compatible, but I've been learning and teaching about blockchain and cryptos for international portals since then. After hundreds of articles and diverse content about the topic, now you can find me here on Alfacash, working for more decentralization.

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