As per a CCN report dated 7th January, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) of Japan is looking at approving the country’s first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
The main question open as of today is – With the final deadline for the VanEck Bitcoin ETF around the corner, will the decision of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have any impact basis the approval of a Bitcoin ETF in Japan?
Currently, the chances of the approval of a Bitcoin ETF in the U.S. by February does not look promising. Earlier Hester Peirce, an SEC commissioner supporting crypto, stated that the investors should not wait on a Bitcoin ETF as it may take days or even years for the commission to approve it. The answer to the question of whether the ETF will get an approval or no will be clearer once the VanEck ETF gets filed.
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Earlier, in the latter half of 2018, the SEC discarded 12 Bitcoin ETFs submitted by the Winklevoss twins along with three other companies. The Winklevoss twins were trying to introduce an ETF by using the cryptocurrency exchanges that will help to calculate the asset’s base price and the rest of the three companies were relying on Bitcoin futures market to launch the ETF.
The SEC believed that 11of these filings were not of significant size, due to which the SEC rejected these.
The VanEck ETF utilizes information from the over-the-counter (OTC) market, which currently is comparatively higher than the cryptocurrency exchange market regarding both volume and trading activity. However, whatever may be the outcome of VanEck, SEC will still evaluate the global cryptocurrency OTC market and will also work on framing strict regulations and monitoring frameworks in major international markets.
Further, various nations such as Japan, Malta, South Korea, Singapore, and few others have laid down strict regulations on Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) thereby keep a continuous track on the suspicious transactions and disallowing anonymous accounts from trading cryptocurrencies.
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As per the statement of the SEC chairman, Jay Clayton, in November last year, adequate safeguard measures and technologies are currently not in place to prevent any suspicious transactions in the overseas markets. He said, “Those kinds of safeguards don’t exist in many of the markets where digital currencies trade.”
