It’s always difficult to overstate the level of chaos and madness typically present on Crypto Twitter, and within the digital assets industry, on any given day. But it’s equally hard to think of a single week that brought such monumental—and unexpected—plot twists and developments as this one.
Things got to a slow start on Monday—until the afternoon brought declarations from Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart, two Bloomberg ETF analysts that have emerged as main characters of the Crypto Twittersphere this year, suddenly announced that they were radically adjusting their previous probabilities that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would approve spot Ethereum ETFs by a Thursday deadline.
Update: @JSeyff and I are increasing our odds of spot Ether ETF approval to 75% (up from 25%), hearing chatter this afternoon that SEC could be doing a 180 on this (increasingly political issue), so now everyone scrambling (like us everyone else assumed they’d be denied). See… https://t.co/gcxgYHz3om
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) May 20, 2024
Twitter—and ETH’s price—immediately exploded. For weeks, the prospect of spot ETH ETF approval in May had been written off as fanciful, for multiple reasons. Now, with 72 hours to go before the SEC’s May 23 decision cutoff, the game was back on? ETH soared over 20% on the news overnight.
Potential ETH ETF issuers kicked from business as usual into overdrive as the industry’s prevailing mood accelerated into frantic excitement.
In real-time, Twitter users attempted to piece together the narrative. How could this have even happened? Experts pointed to seeds planted last week, when a string of surprising shifts in the political winds may have transformed crypto from divisive, niche wedge issue into a matter of bipartisan consensus.
The narrative appeared validated on Thursday, when—right at the buzzer—the SEC quietly approved all pending spot ETH ETF applications.
Crypto Twitter exploded in a cacophony of celebration.
Industry leaders, including Coinbase’s chief legal officer Paul Grewal, hailed the week’s events as unlike any he’d previously witnessed.
As if that wasn’t enough: amidst the entire mind-boggling ETH ETF saga, the U.S. House of Representatives handily passed a bill aimed at creating a crypto regulatory framework, FIT21.
The narrative of a historic, overnight realignment of crypto’s long-tenuous relationship with the American government had solidified. Just a week ago, such a state of play would have been dismissed as unthinkable by many.
Some cautioned that said narrative might also be too good to be true, however. Certain aspects of FIT21, for example, might be more hostile to crypto than many realize, crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro wrote.
As Crypto Twitter was largely jubilant—for good reason—history may just show a battle won in a longer war. “We have to stay vigilant,” Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO Joe Lubin told Decrypt. “We can’t assume that we’re not going to be attacked again.”
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