Without a doubt, the biggest news stories in the world of digital currencies this week were made by Bitcoin and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. By the end of October, an exchange-traded fund based on Bitcoin futures will be listed on Wall Street under the BITO ticker symbol. SEC regulators did not object to the ProShares application to manage an ETF with BTC futures as the underlying asset, and this had quite the effect on trading.

Now that BTC/USD has settled higher than $61K, investors are looking for more positive updates on a fundamental level. One of them is related to Binance, the top cryptocurrency exchange platform that recently unveiled a new blockchain research fund with $1 billion worth of capital. Even for a giant such as Binance, a billion-dollar funding operation is not something to easily dismiss.

Even more exciting news came from Coinbase, which recently introduced marketplace support for non-fungible tokens. NFTs have gotten the attention of many investors; the FTX trading platform and exchange protocol is now working to launch their own token ecosystem. Last but not least, the total crypto market cap for the first ten days of the new year hit a record high of over $600 billion USD. The combined capitalization of the entire crypto market is up almost 150% since the beginning of 2018. According to a recent Bloomberg survey, this is the fastest growing asset class in history.

The SEC has made it clear that it will not regulate Bitcoin futures as currency, but as a commodity. This means that the Bitcoin futures listed on CME will not be regulated as CFDs, but rather as futures contracts, and this extends to the underlying assets of the ProShares ETF. This is a huge step forward in opening Bitcoin to more investors, since the Bitcoin futures market has a large following of institutional investors and has been consistently growing in the last few years. However, it should be noted that as a commodity, the SEC would still be able to regulate Bitcoin and any other cryptocurrency that makes an appearance on the market.