The SEC's bitcoin saga

The past 48 hours have encapsulated the relationship between crypto players and their regulators so uncannily that such a drama would’ve been scrapped in a writers’ room for being too far-fetched yet on-the-nose. 

On Tuesday, still-unknown actors hacked the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Twitter account, claiming that the regulator had approved the launch of spot bitcoin ETFs. But like many initiatives in the cryptoverse, it was a scam. The SEC quickly took the post down and blamed the false announcement on a hack.

(As The Block’s Tim Copeland cheekily noted, “Despite regularly posting about cybersecurity awareness and the importance of using multi-factor authentication, it appears that the SEC failed to secure its own X account in the same way.”)

The price of bitcoin, which had jumped by two percent in the wake of the news, then fell by three percent once the announcement turned out to be fake. 

Source: Crypto.com

But then the fake announcement became true.

The SEC, it turns out, did approve 9 ETFs and two conversions from other financial products. It just did so on Wednesday, not Tuesday. 

In his statement yesterday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler warned that approval of these ETFs was by no means a promotion of the financial instrument. Bitcoin is a speculative asset used for illegal activities, Gensler warned, to the dismay of evangelists like Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood. 

The saga writ large suggests that the SEC has only approved these financial products because it was required to. Following its loss against Greyscale Investments in court, the SEC was largely expected to greenlight a spot bitcoin ETF sometime this year. The unwitting scammy-ness surrounding the SEC’s announcement adds fuel to its warning about the crypto sector—but the SEC’s lax security measures further suggest that the regulator may be outdated in its operations and worldview. 

Investors may ultimately function as an arbiter for who’s right. Bitcoin could, perhaps, normalize as it enters more mainstream fora. Or it could continue on its largely libertarian (and relatively small-scale) path, depriving its believers of the runaway wealth generation their visions promise. 

One lesson’s already been learned either way: Set up multi-factor authentication, especially on government accounts.