Another legacy firm from Wall Street is joining the race for a Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund, following early filings from BlackRock and Fidelity.
Franklin Templeton, a financial giant founded in the mid-20th century, filed an application for a so-called “Franklin Bitcoin ETF” on Tuesday morning, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Archive.
Franklin Templeton’s filing said it would list the Bitcion ETF on Cboe’s BZX exchange and, like Blackrock, list Coinbase as its Bitcoin custodian.
Franklin Templeton wrote in the filing that the company will use the CF Benchmark Index, a fusion of Bitcoin prices from numerous independent cryptocurrency exchanges, to inform its prices and prevent potential price manipulation.
A spokesman for the asset manager declined to comment on the filing.
Franklin Templeton’s filing comes after a federal appeals court unanimously ruled last month that the SEC erred in rejecting cryptocurrency firm Grayscale’s bid to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF. In a highly anticipated ruling, the court said the rejection was “inconsistent” with the agency’s previous approval of a Bitcoin futures ETF.
The push to obtain a spot Bitcoin ETF has been described as “holy grailFor the crypto industry, the approval is expected to attract potentially trillions of dollars in investment from conservative institutional investors such as pension funds.
For years, companies like Grayscale have been trying and failing to convince the SEC to approve a Bitcoin spot ETF, even though the agency has approved a number of Bitcoin futures trading products. The SEC has repeatedly pointed to potential market manipulation as one of the key factors in its repeated rejections of corporate ETF applications.
Bitcoin’s price surged to over $31,000 on the back of BlackRock and Fidelity’s ETF filings, but has since plummeted and never regained the momentum that pushed the world’s largest cryptocurrency to its highest price in more than a year.
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