Breaking: U.S. SEC Says Cboe BZX Exchange Has Withdrawn Proposal for VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF

On Wednesday (January 23th), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“Commission”) announced that Cboe BZX Exchange (“BZX”), which was going to be the exchange that would list the VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF if it got approved, has withdrawn the proposed rule change.

The SEC’s notice said that BZX had withdrawn the “Proposed Rule Change to List and Trade Shares of SolidX Bitcoin Shares Issued by the VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust“, and that this proposal (SR-CboeBZX-2018- 040) had been withdrawn on Tuesday (January 22nd).

BZX had filed with the Commission this proposed rule change on 20 June 2018; this proposal “was published for comment in the Federal Register on July 2, 2018.” Since then, VanEck, SolidX, and BZX had been waiting for the Commission to hopefully approve the proposed rule change, but the Commission kept asking for more time to make its decision, and the final deadline was going to be February 27th. 

On January 18th, American lawyer Jake Chervinsky, who is highly-respected in the crypto community for his excellent commentaries on how U.S. securities laws affect companies that deal with cryptoassets, decided to focus his attention on the VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF proposal and how its approval/denial may (or may not) be affected by the current U.S. government shutdown (which began on 22 December 2018).

The reason that Chervisnky took to Twitter to comment on this particular Bitcoin ETF proposal and how it might be affected by the current government shutdown is that he had noticed on Twitter “a lot of confusion & misinformation about how the shutdown affects the SEC and its process for handling ETF proposals.”

The conclusion of his twitterstorm was: “All I’m saying is that the shutdown doesn’t improve the ETF’s chances of approval at all. In fact, the opposite is probably true.”

We will update this article as more information about the reason for BZX’s withdrawal of the proposal becomes clear.

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