Is Japan’s Bitcoin ETF Approval Dragging SEC To Make A Decision?

In the latest headlines of our DC Forecasts Bitcoin news site, we have mentioned about the situation in Japan – specifically the government’s decision to approve a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). As soon as this occurred, many analysts poked their fingers into the potential regulation of Bitcoin ETFs in the United States as one of the largest markets.

Currently, everyone is asking themselves if the Bitcoin ETF approval in Japan could also drag the authorities in the US to a decision and have an impact on the Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC) which is the main authority over there.

However, the probability of a Bitcoin ETF approval in the US still remains low. According to one pro-crypto SEC commissioner and his recent statement, investors should not wait on a Bitcoin ETF because it may take days or years for the commission to approve such thing.

In the second half of 2018, the SEC rejected 12 Bitcoin ETFs, one of which was submitted by the Gemini exchange founders (Winklevoss twins), as well as other companies. All of the filings were rejected by the SEC because of insignificant market sizes.

In late November 2018, the SEC chairman Jay Clayton said that safeguards and technologies to prevent suspicious transactions are non-existent in overseas markets. As he then stated:

“Those kinds of safeguards don’t exist in many of the markets where digital currencies trade.”

All in all, Japan’s effort and the G20 meeting that proposed regulation of cryptocurrencies have brought a lot of attention on this market. If a bitcoin ETF is approved in Japan before the US, there may be a chance that the US government will start approving similar ETFs in (some of) its local markets.