Bitcoin and other crypto assets spurted briefly late Thursday after fund management giant BlackRock iShares’ unit filed paperwork Thursday afternoon with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the formation of a spot bitcoin (BTC) ETF, but the rally fizzled out well short of the $26,000 threshold BTC lost nearly a week ago. Despite the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s message to banks to follow a risk-based approach to managing the risks of individual customers, potential crypto clients have found it nearly impossible to get on-board. Banks are wary of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and CFTC’s accusations of Binance and Coinbase co-mingling funds and violating securities laws. As a result, Hong Kong may have a long way to go before it can be considered a crypto hub.
The largest cryptocurrency was recently trading at $25,556, up nearly 2% over the past 24 hours. Ether spiked similarly to trade above $1,660, a 0.8% gain from Wednesday same time. Other major cryptos went from the negative territory they’d occupied for much of Thursday to green with SOL, the token of the Solana smart contracts platform Solana, recently up 1.8%, and SAND and AXS also rising more than a percentage point. MATIC, the native crypto of the Polygon blockchain, was down more than 4%.
Brian D. Evans, the CEO of Web3 venture studio and advisory firm BDE Ventures, noted the investor angst about the increasingly unfavorable U.S. crypto climate. “I feel like we’re at the beginning of a big shift involving project founders seeking locations to base themselves outside the United States,” Evans wrote. “In this sense, the market feels very dislocated. In the United States, they’re left scratching their heads over the intricacies of a regulatory system that hasn’t been updated since the Great Depression.”
Evans wrote that this failing has sent projects “searching out better-regulated jurisdictions, such as Hong Kong, Dubai and the U.K.” He added: “A global reshuffling is taking place that is shaping up to center the next burst of innovation and market exuberance in Asia and the Middle East. In that sense, then, I think the digital asset ecosystem is actually becoming more robust, making the likely fireworks following the next Bitcoin halving all the more surprising to a large number of observers. In short, the bullishness is there, yes, but it’s increasingly being driven by events happening abroad.”
The news of the day also included Polygon Labs rolling out an open database for blockchain use cases, Colombia’s Central Bank partnering with Ripple to explore blockchain use cases, Crypto Exchange Bybit integrating ChatGPT into trading tools, USDT selling on Curve and Uniswap spooking traders amid Bitcoin drop, and Hong Kong putting pressure on 3 major banks to take on crypto exchanges as clients.