'Don't Hold Your Breath' Waiting on a Bitcoin ETF: SEC's Peirce

"The approval of an ETF would obviously be a huge thing for the crypto community," said Dáire Ferguson, chief executive officer of Irish online currency platform AvaTrade Ltd. "There is optimism in the market due to the recent bull run, and that optimism seems to spill over the SEC delays and negate any negative views of hopeful investors. The general feeling is that progress is made every day, little by little."

Cryptocurrencies have been a hot potato for regulators partly because of their anonymous ownership and consumer complaints of scams. In the U.K., some 1,500 reports of supposed fraud were tallied last year by the Financial Conduct Authority and Action Fraud, the national reporting center for fraud and cybercrime.

The Washington-based SEC pointedly asked respondents to comment on issues central to avoiding price manipulation and fraud, such as their views on how the ETF's price will be determined. Promoters plan to use a "proprietary, non-public methodology that uses the privately reported bid/ask spreads of an unidentified set of U.S.-based market-makers in the OTC marketplace," the SEC said.

"We continue the hard work towards better-regulated, safer and more liquid digital assets markets," Gabor Gurbacs, VanEck's director of digital strategy, tweeted after the SEC announcement. "Bitcoin is too big to ignore."

The SEC set a 35-day period for additional comments on changing securities rules to allow VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust to trade.

"Investors should keep doing what they're doing and not put too much weight in whether the SEC approves something or doesn't approve something," said Peirce. "Because these processes can take a very long time."

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