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ARK Invest, one of the high-profile companies vying for a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), has amended its SEC filing to add a surveillance-sharing agreement. The change occurred a week after BlackRock filed for its own spot Bitcoin ETF, which did include such an agreement.
As ARK submitted its proposal to the SEC in April, nearly two months before BlackRock's application, today's revision could help ARK cross the finish line first.
According to today’s filing, the agreement—dubbed “Spot BTC SSA”—is between ARK, the Chicago Board Options (CBOE) BZX Exchange, and a cryptocurrency platform. Which cryptocurrency trading platform it will be, however, was not disclosed.
A surveillance-sharing agreement (SSA) refers to information that is shared with regulators in order to prevent potential market manipulation. This includes market trading activity, clearing activity, and customer identification. The SEC has been adamant that none of the applicants has proven that they can adequately protect investors against manipulative practices.
Previous rejected or pending applications had not included SSAs, which caught the notice of many when BlockRock included one in last week’s ETF filing. The $9 trillion dollar asset manager brought the buzz and the bulls back with its application last week. Whether the industry views it favorably because of its size, or due to the surveillance-sharing agreement, is a matter of speculation.
Cathie Wood’s ARK fund—which first applied for a spot Bitcoin ETF back in June 2021 together with global crypto ETF provider 21Shares—was rejected earlier this year by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Regulators cited, once again, a failure to prove how they can stave off market manipulation by cryptocurrency traders.
The SEC did approve, however, the first leveraged Bitcoin futures ETF last Friday. The exchange-traded fund, BITX, traded yesterday for the first time, registering a successful launch, with $5.5 million in trades for the day.