After months of speculation and a frenzy of attention that crossed over from crypto Twitter to mainstream financial channels, those long-awaited spot BTC ETFs finally gained approval from the SEC earlier this month, and from there, were almost immediately up and running.
There was the added last minute drama of the SEC having its X account compromised, resulting in a fake approval post going out a day early, an occurrence which will go down as yet another moment of disruptive madness in Bitcoin history, but in the end, the consensus was that we were in uncharted but inevitable territory; stepping across the chasm between a novel, volatile, and frequently misunderstood monetary technology, and the (ostensibly) risk-averse world of orthodox, mainstream finance.
Chart from The Block
After all, with the investment titan BlackRock on board, what more weighty seal of trad-fi approval could Bitcoin garner? As it turned out, though, there was still some institutional doubt remaining, and not every major player is in agreement about BTC’s prospects, either as an investment choice or for any other purpose, as revealed when customers with Vanguard discovered that the firm had opted not to provide access to those hugely hyped-up new spot ETFs.
In fact, not only did Vanguard choose not to offer the new BTC products, but it then made the decision to stop offering BTC futures ETFs, which had previously…
