Published: March 5th, 2025
America's Securities and Exchange Commission has released the names of its Crypto Task Force, blending longtime agency officials with senior attorneys and analysts who specialise in blockchain and the market for digital assets.
Led by pro-crypto SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, its hoped that the task force’s recommendations will create the regulatory clarity crypto markets need to grow while creating the conditions for mass adoption.
In a statement released on Monday, Peirce said that the task force will work to identify 'workable solutions’ to current regulatory challenges, suggesting that closer engagement with the crypto industry is in the cards.
Taylor Asher, a former policy advisor to Commissioner Mark Uyeda, will be chief policy advisor to the task force. SEC counsel Richard Gabbert (a former advisor to Peirce) will be the task force’s chief of staff. Michael Selig, a partner at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, will act as chief counsel.
Other members include executives of the pro-crypto Coin Center think tank and attorneys from Baker Hostetler LLP, a law firm specializing in NFT and metaverse regulatory issues.
The task force launch is a response to growing pressure on the country's lead financial watchdog to clarify its stance on crypto regulation. Industry stakeholders have long been critical of the ‘enforce now, explain later’ approach to crypto oversight that dominated under former Chair Gary Gensler.
Gensler, a crypto skeptic, was adamant that most crypto assets should be designated securities and regulated the same way.
At the end of May of 2024, Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) took custody of more than one million BTC, a milestone in market adoption following the SEC’s January approval of investment instruments that track BTC price moves.
According to data released by Coinglass, 30-plus Bitcoin ETFs collectively owned 1,002,341 BTC on 29th May. Those holdings represented roughly five per cent of the BTC supply currently in circulation globally and had an approximate value of USD 70.5 billion at time of writing.
That figure was about five times larger than the hoard held by MicroStrategy, then (and still) one of the biggest corporate holders of Bitcoin. The company listed its current BTC investments at 214,400 BTC, worth about USD 15 billion.
Most of the ETF holdings were under the control of the major American Bitcoin spot ETFs approved by the SEC in January, and which overshot the performance of every previous ETF launch in history. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (287,167 BTC) and the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (289,039 BTC) cumulatively commanded over half the ETF Bitcoin.
The next largest positions were held by Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust (161,537 BTC), Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (48,443 BTC), and the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (36,184 BTC). Outside the US, Canada’s Purpose Bitcoin ETF held on to its position as the largest Bitcoin ETF holding globally at 27,110 BTC. It was also the first spot Bitcoin ETF to launch anywhere.
Bitcoin ETFs give investors limited exposure to Bitcoin price moves and wrap the asset with other more stable securities inside a retirement or other tax-optimized account. They can also act as a vehicle for corporations and large financial institutions who want access to crypto markets in jurisdictions where they are blocked by law from buying crypto assets directly on an exchange.
In April of last year, Whales, institutions, corporates and other large investors went bullish on Bitcoin , with more than USD 114 million flowing into BTC funds.
A report from digital assets firm CoinShares said big investors were pouring their millions into leading Bitcoin funds, and had been for four-weeks running, in what analysts called a ‘flight to safety’. The biggest beneficiaries of new inflows were established funds for accredited investors from firms like 21 Shares, 3iQ, and Grayscale.
BTC was the main focus by far, attracting USD 103 million in new investment. The growth happened against a wider market backdrop that has led to ‘very low volumes’ in Bitcoin trades generally, CoinShares said.
CoinShares noted in the report that improving prospects for crypto as an asset class was down to fears about the ‘ongoing challenges’ being experienced by traditional finance over the past three months.
Revisiting a trend first seen in early 2022, major investors took another look at Bitcoin and liked what they saw. Confidence in traditional finance had been shaken by the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Credit Suisse in Europe.
Ethereum, the second-place coin by market capitalization, also implemented its Shanghai blockchain upgrade in mid-April, enabling the withdrawal of staked ETH by network users.
Analysts predicted that more than USD 300 million of the coin would be sold-off in the aftermath of the upgrade, but ETH’s price has actually risen since Shanghai was implemented.
Perhaps buoyed by the surge in investor interest, Bitcoin’s price held firm at just above USD 30,000 for most of the month.
In April of 2022, a previous CoinShares report found that crypto markets were losing ground, firming up an emerging consensus that the crypto winter would extend into summer and possibly beyond.
Total market cap had fallen to USD 1.4 trillion while BTC’s price was also sliding towards USD 30,000.
Big investors reacted by flowing more cash into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other exchange-traded instruments that derive value from digital assets.
It's worth noting that we haven’t witnessed the same spike in investment product trading activity as we would expect to see during extreme periods of price weakness,’ the forward to the CoinShares report says. 'The question is: does this mean the month-long run of negative crypto sentiment we’ve seen is finished?’
One reason mooted for the anomaly was the fact that price action which had tanked Bitcoin and Ethereum to depths some 50 per cent below their all-time highs was actually less drastic than falls seen in previous bear markets.
