July 10, 2018
This seems like a bad idea. Barely anything has been built on the underlying asset outside of exchanges and a lot of hopium.
A lot of speculation and bad market behavior (wash trades, unbacked stablecoins, no-fee trading) brought the price to 20k, and then FOMO brought it back down to 6k. Based on decreased volumes, it seems that the people most enthusiastic about an ETF were the same people virtue signalling against regulated/institutional forces astro-turfing their cryptanarchist dream. Basically, the people looking for reasons to keep the bitcoin network a ponzi instead of a censorship-resistant bearer asset. Listing this ETF would only serve to provide last minute-liquidity to speculators who bought in between 8000-19100. This doesn't seem to be a chicken/egg phenom, utility (or at least high trading volume independent of price) behind the underlying asset is arguably more necessary than introducing higher-stakes gambling to old money with ETFs.
It makes way more sense to support an ETF for a decentralized asset when:
a) businesses are using the platform in mission-critical ways (aside from exchanges and illicit markets), or
b) enough people are trading this asset independent of news to indicate that it will be hard to move the price up/down.
Injecting a bunch of money and the potential to make more derivatives on top of a still-speculative asset doesn't seem like a good move.