The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has postponed its decision to allow options trading for BlackRock and Bitwise’s spot Ethereum (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) until mid-November, according to filings dated September 24 .
The new deadlines for BlackRock and Bitwise are November 10 and November 11, respectively. The SEC stated that it needed more time to consider the proposal and extended the initial 45-day review period that would have ended on September 26 for BlackRock, as Nasdaq had filed for the rule change for the iShares Ethereum Trust ETF on July 22.
The same reasoning was applied to Bitwise’s ETHW, which had its decision date pushed back to November 11, as the proposed rule change was filed a day after BlackRock’s.
Options are a big deal for crypto ETFs
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) received SEC approval for options trading on September 20.
Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said this was a “huge win” for Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs as they will attract more liquidity and, consequently, more “big fish.”
Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at VanEck, also shared a report from K33 Research on September 24, highlighting that Bitcoin’s derivatives market is 279x smaller than its equity and commodity counterparts.
Notably, the volume of Bitcoin options traded on the top five centralized crypto exchanges between September 1 and 22 was equivalent to approximately $33.3 billion.
Meanwhile, the volume of Ethereum options during the same period was only $9.2 billion, more than three times smaller than that of Bitcoin. So Ethereum ETFs have even more room for growth thanks to the addition of options trading by the SEC.
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Gino Matos
Gino Matos is a law graduate and a seasoned journalist with six years of experience in the crypto industry. His expertise focuses primarily on the Brazilian blockchain ecosystem and developments in decentralized finance (DeFi).
Assad Jafri
A passionate journalist since Yemen’s Arab Spring in 2011, AJ has honed his skills globally for more than a decade. Specialized in financial journalism, he now focuses on crypto reporting.