Speaking at the ongoing CoinDesk's Consensus Invest conference in New York, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton spoke on why his agency hasn’t yet approved a bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF). But the rationale behind his words is nothing his crypto-friendly audience hasn’t heard before.Clayton explained that his agency might not approve a bitcoin ETF anytime soon as the agency's issues are yet to be addressed by market operators. Clayton singled out theft and manipulation of cryptocurrencies as two issues that need to be sorted out before the commission can give its blessings to an ETF, something that prior rejection orders have repeated ad infinitum. In these rejection orders, the SEC claims that each applicant has failed “to demonstrate that its proposal is consistent with the requirements of the Exchange Act Section 6(b)(5), in particular the requirement that its rules be designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices,” continuing to say that “novel systems intrinsic to this new market provide unique additional protections that are unavailable in traditional commodity markets,” namely “traditional means of identifying and deterring fraud and manipulation.”These “traditional means” are surveillance sharing agreements, something the rejection orders stress as one of the avenues through which a product might win approval. In his own talk, Chairman Cla...
