SEC delays Franklin Bitcoin ETF a month ahead of deadline; all ETFs could be approved together now

• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the approval delay way before the deadline of January 1.
• This is most likely an attempt at ensuring fair play by approving all Spot BTC ETFs together in January.
• On the other hand Standard Chartered is still holding on to its opinion that Bitcoin price will reach $100,000 by the end of 2024.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) took the rather unexpected decision of providing its decision on an application nearly 30 days before its scheduled deadline. While it may not be terrible news, it seems to confirm one thing from the SEC.

All Bitcoin ETFs could be approved together

The SEC, in a filing on Tuesday, gave its decision on one of the last two remaining Spot Bitcoin ETF applicants - Franklin. Hashdex and Franklin are the only two entities that were scheduled to receive their decision just before the rest of the applicants did. January 1, 2024, was their scheduled deadline and had the SEC delayed its decision right then, it would have needed a little longer than nine days to provide its next decision.

This would have interfered with the regulatory body’s plans to approve all the Spot BTC ETF applications at the same time. The Commission is doing so in order to eliminate any first-mover advantage that either of the applicants may receive if not all the applications are given a green light at the same time.

This was explained by crypto enthusiast and lawyer Scott Johnson, who said,

“The issue was Global X had a comment period ending December 29. So, if the SEC wanted to approve all at the same time, they had to do this. Otherwise Global X period would have ended on a Friday on the last business day before the Hashdex/Franklin deadline. No time to do approval.

Similarly, Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart also took to X, formerly Twitter, to reiterate that the delay for Hashdex’s application confirms that the SEC is likely lining all the spot BTC ETF applications up for potential approval by January 10, 2024.

This date is expected to be the point of initiation of the next bull run as institutions, along with retail investors, would flood the market with money as they get their hands on the newly launched ETFs.

Standard Chartered Bitcoin targets are intact

Back in April this year, the team of the Standard Chartered bank, led by Geoff Kendrick, forecasted that Bitcoin price will most likely reach $100,000 by the end of 2024. The team stated that the ETFs would act as the catalyst. 

This opinion was reiterated recently by the bank and Kendrick’s team, saying that the targets remain unchanged as everything is still in place. He added that the dominance of Bitcoin in the cryptocurrency space is well above 50%, up from 45% in April.

This would mean that Bitcoin price would need to rally by 168% in the span of just 13 months. Furthermore, when 1 BTC is valued at $100,000, the total market cap of the cryptocurrency would rise to $1.955 trillion, given the current circulating supply of 19.55 million BTC.

BTC/USD 1-day chart

This is higher than the market capitalization of the entire crypto market at the moment and is also higher than that of most of the commodities and stocks except for Microsoft and Apple, making this a rather unlikely event.

Nevertheless, given the coming conditions and the rise in adoption, it will prove to be a highly bullish season for Bitcoin.