The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has expected to postpone its decision on applications for Bitcoin ETF approval.

The application from Bitwise Asset Management was lodged on 15 February, and the SEC should have commented on it by 30 March at the latest. As the Commission considered it needed more time to assess it, it took the opportunity to postpone the decision until 16 May 2019.

The same fate has a joint request from VanEck, SolidX and CBOE. The SEC has set a new deadline for it to be May 21, 2019.

Postponing the deadline for a definitive verdict for these applications is no surprise. Similar fate was also attempted to approve Bitcoin ETF last year. The most promising for approval by VanEck, SolidX and CBOE was finally withdrawn by the CBOE promoter after almost half a year of waiting, as a US dispute between Donald Trump and the US Congress took place. For this reason, the SEC did not have enough staff to assess the application and would therefore probably have rejected it automatically, which CBOE wanted to avoid.

Does Bitcoin ETF have a chance for approval?
ETFs are securities that track the basket of assets proportionally represented in the fund's shares. The possibility of approving the first Bitcoin ETF is closely monitored in the cryptocommunity, as its possibly permission could have a beneficial effect on the price of this cryptocurrency.

In general, however, it is believed that the SEC will not approve the ETF on Bitcoin this year because it still does not have sufficient guarantees that the Bitcoin price is not significantly manipulated.

These suspicions could alleviate the findings of Bitwise Asset Management, which found in its study that the reported volumes of Bitcoin trading on unregulated stock exchanges are extremely inflated and the real "volume" of Bitcoin accounts for only about 5% of these figures.

For example, while official stock exchange data claim that today Bitcoin trading volume is $ 10 billion, Bitwise said it is only about $ 300 million. For Bitcoin ETF approval, these findings may have a positive effect in that they only generate a few of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges with the exception of Binance, which are regulated and licensed by FinCEN or NYDFS. This means that the bitcoin price manipulation is very small, because the market mainly consists of these exchanges respecting strict rules. It is also positive that the Bitcoin price is almost identical on these exchanges.

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