Bitcoin tops $60,000 as investors bet on ETF approval

Bitcoin prices continued their October surge on Friday, topping $60,000 on hopes that the Securities and Exchange Commission will soon approve a bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund.

Cryptocurrency investors were excited by a tweet from the verified account of the SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy late Thursday that said, “before investing in a fund that holds Bitcoin futures contracts,

make sure you carefully weigh the potential risks and benefits.”
That appeared to be a tacit admission that the SEC would soon give the regulatory green light to “a fund that holds Bitcoin futures contracts.”

Numerous investing firms, including ProShares, Invesco, VanEck and Galaxy Digital, have filed with the SEC for bitcoin futures ETFs.

Another ETF firm, Valkyrie, has also filed for a bitcoin ETF. On Friday, the Nasdaq disclosed in a SEC filing that the Valkyrie fund was ready for listing on the exchange — pending a final approval from the SEC.

Bitcoin ETFs are a way for individual investors that don’t want to go through the trouble of mining -— i.e. using fancy hardware to solve complex mathematical problems that generate a new bitcoin — to access other ways to buy and sell the cryptocurrency.

And bItcoin bulls have been waiting for the SEC to approve one, with the hopes that having an ETF will make it even easier for average investors to buy crypto.
“It seems clear that regulators will approve some version of a crypto ETF soon,” said Chris Kline, chief operating officer and co-founder of Bitcoin IRA.,

adding that “the SEC is starting to understand how these assets are stored, secured, and reconciled so that it makes sense in traditional finance.”
Brokerages like Coinbase and Robinhood allow for bitcoin transactions, and there are also several ETFs already that invest in companies tied to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.