Bitcoin is swelling these days like a hot air balloon of speculation on Wall Street. The swelling is of courage and also of regained self-esteem among his acolytes. No wonder: cryptocurrency has managed to set foot in the halls of traditional investment, but without giving up its founding spirit, that of the libertarian currency outside the large central banks.
At the beginning of the year, the US market supervisor, the SEC, authorized a dozen bitcoin ETFs (exchange traded funds) for the first time. The organization had been reluctant, but the courts endorsed this type of investment. Why can an investment fund invest in anything and not a cryptocurrency? The argument is unappealable.
The consequence of this authorization has been a strong revaluation of bitcoin, which has exceeded $50,000 and left behind the crypto winter caused by scandals around platforms such as FTX or Binance. It is still far from the record of $65,000, but the parishioners of this digital deity feel the call again. Since the SEC gave its approval, its price has risen 15%.
What effects will this measure have, in the United States and Spain? “There will be more people who take the step and start investing in bitcoin. Soon banks will be able to offer mixed products with this cryptocurrency and open the door to new investors,” predicts Víctor Garcia Font, professor of Multimedia and Telecommunications Studies at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). He warns that “more risk will be generated” and predicts a new role for intermediation platforms. “I don’t think they are going to disappear, but rather that in the future they will be more regulated and will end up looking more like a bank than a website.”
The forecast is that, one way or another, Spanish banks will end up offering the option of investing in this type of US funds, although only to institutional investors. An analogy can be made with the real estate sector: one can invest directly in brick or do so in a SOCIMI, which is a company dedicated precisely to this, to invest in brick.
When the top officials of the Spanish investors association, Inverco, are asked about the recent authorization of bitcoin-traded funds on Wall Street, they twist their gestures. “I have a very radical opinion and I prefer not to give it,” says one of the members of its board of directors. Finally, the president of the association, Ángel Martínez-Aldama, decides to give the most politically correct response that he can improvise: “We refer to both the Bank of Spain and the CNMV and we support their actions. We will see how it evolves in the United States.”
The normalization of these investments does not transform the hollow and highly speculative nature of bitcoin. The president of the SEC himself, Gary Gensler, has taken it upon himself to offer all kinds of warnings: “Bitcoin is primarily a speculative and volatile asset that is also used for illicit activities” and “we do not approve or adopt it.”
Cautions aside, Wisdom Tree’s director of digital assets, Benjamin Dean, believes that the new Wall Street funds will be “something similar to a bitcoin iTunes.” “They will give security, confidence and familiarity” to this product. Of course, progress is restricted for now to “institutional investors” on both sides of the Atlantic. Individuals will have to settle for continuing to play cryptoroulette on current platforms.
