Bitcoin ETF hype has Wall Street eyeing US$100 billion cryptocurrency potential

financialpost.com:

It’s being touted as crypto’s big breakthrough on Wall Street: The imminent arrival of bitcoin exchange-traded funds that will kick open digital-currency investing to the institutional and retail masses.

That’s driving the latest hype cycle in the world’s largest token on bets that the likes of wealth managers and financial advisers will finally start to lavish a small portion of their trillion-dollar portfolios on the cryptocurrency promise.

Thank an oncoming swing in the regulatory pendulum. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission is expected, possibly by mid-January or sooner, to green-light funds that will buy and sell bitcoin in the famously tax-efficient and cost-effective ETF wrapper — after a decade of rejecting such applications.

At first blush, it offers a path to redemption for digital-asset proponents a year after the FTX Trading Ltd. implosion sparked the industry’s biggest existential crisis and emboldened cryptocurrency naysayers who’ve long dominated traditional finance.

Now, with the likely involvement of respectable heavyweights such as BlackRock Inc., FMR LLC and Invesco Ltd., the spot-bitcoin ETF market has the potential to grow into a US$100-billion juggernaut in time, according to Bloomberg Intelligence estimates.

Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd., which is working with Invesco on an application, held a call earlier this month with roughly 300 investment professionals about allocating to bitcoin as an ETF debut nears, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Jeff Janson is one of the people gearing up for the debut. The wealth adviser at Naples, Fla.-based Summit Wealth Partners LLC has already received calls from investors, young and old.

“I feel like we are now staring down the gun