The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a financial market regulator has rejected the application to launch a Bitcoin ETF filed jointly by New York-based Wilshire Phoenix and NYSE Arca exchange.
The SEC published the rejection on Wednesday citing the lack by the applicants to prove sufficient measures to prevent manipulation of the Bitcoin market. in addition, the commission reiterated in its latest rejection the same reasons for denying a Bitcoin ETF as it has previously with applications from large firms such as Cboe, Bitwise and Winklevoss twins.
“The Commission must disapprove a proposed rule change filed by a national securities exchange if it does not find that the proposed rule change is consistent with the applicable requirements of the Exchange Act — including the requirement under Section 6(b) (5) that the rules of a national securities exchange be designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices,” the commission wrote in its 76-page statement on the rejection of the Wilshire Bitcoin ETF rule-change proposal.
Wilshire had filed the request to amend the Exchange Act to allow for the launch of the Bitcoin ETF mid-last year.
The Wednesday rejection led one of the commission’s commissioners to publicly decent on the decision. Hester Peirce, popularly known as the ‘Crypto Mom’ following her popular dissenting views on most policies by the commission related to cryptocurrency products.
Peirce published her statement on Wednesday a few moments after the SEC published its rejection letter to Wilshire. She said that the SEC is arbitrarily setting higher standards for cryptocurrency-related products which makes it harder to adhere to these rules and therefore stifling innovation in the sector.
“This order is the latest in a long string of disapproval orders that the Commission has issued regarding bitcoin-related products,” Peirce wrote in her public dissent statement. “This line of disapprovals leads me to conclude that this Commission is unwilling to approve the listing of any product that would provide access to the market for bitcoin and that no filing will meet the ever-shifting standards that this Commission insists on applying to bitcoin-related products—and only to bitcoin-related products.”
Peirce first publicly expressed her pro-bitcoin views back in 2018 when the SEC rejected the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust application to launch a highly anticipated Bitcoin ETF on the Bats BZX Exchange. Following this event, she was then nicknamed the Crypto Mom and has since then lived to her moniker. In the latest statement, she added that “the Commission’s approach to these bitcoin exchange-traded products is frustrating because it evinces a stubborn stodginess in the face of innovation.”
