BlackRock Has Quietly Opened The Door To A ‘Trillion-Dollar Plus’ Wall Street Game-Changer Amid The $700 Billion Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP And Crypto Price Boom

Bitcoin
BTC
and crypto prices—including major coins ethereum and XRP
XRP
—have rocketed higher in recent months as crypto braces for what could be its biggest ever year in 2024.

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The bitcoin price has topped $40,000 per bitcoin for the first time since early 2022, largely thanks to a huge BlackRock bombshell that pushed up the wider ethereum, XRP and crypto market.

Now, as wild rumors swirl around a secret soverign bitcoin bid, BlackRock has quietly adjusted its landmark bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) application to allow Wall Street giants such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs access.

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In a late November filing, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager that looks around around $10 trillion on behalf of clients, updated its bitcoin spot ETF filing to allow Wall Street banks to act as “authorized participants,” allowing them to bypass restrictions that prevent them from holding bitcoin and crypto on their own balance sheets.

The change comes as BlackRock and its rivals in the race to get a bitcoin spot ETF to market, including Fidelity, Grayscale Investment and Franklin Templeton, have met with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to thrash out the details of how the ETFs would work ahead of the next approval “window” opening.

“If the SEC accepts this revised, dual model of create and redeem with cash and physical, that means the liquidity that supports the ETF shares when they trade would be increased, because obviously, you have more potential [authorized participants] as part of the process,” Sui Chung, the chief executive at CF Benchmarks, which is involved in BlackRock’s bitcoin spot ETF bid, told Coindesk.

“And although trading firms like Jane Street, etc. are large and are experts, they fundamentally don’t have the trillion-dollar plus balance sheets that large American banks have.”

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Meanwhile, bitcoin and crypto traders are nervously eyeing a market pull back following its surge higher in recent weeks.

“The recent bitcoin price correction seems more like profit fixing by short-term investors and traders after an impressive rally that started in the middle of October,” Ruslan Lienkha, chief of markets at bitcoin and crypto trading platform YouHodler, said in emailed comments.

“A 6%-10% daily price change is not something extraordinary for bitcoin, given the crypto market’s relatively small size than traditional financial markets. Also, we don’t see deleveraging in the market; crypto traders are continuing to take an elevated risk. For this reason, we might see an even higher volatility in the near future.”