Michael Saylor, founder and CEO of MicroStrategy, the dominant holder of Bitcoin among US-listed companies, predicted on the 2nd that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will classify Ethereum as a security this summer and reject applications for Ethereum spot ETFs.
In light of this, Consensys, the parent company of the popular cryptocurrency wallet Metamask, filed a lawsuit against the SEC on April 26, accusing the SEC of intending to classify Ethereum (ETH) as a security. They criticized this as an “illegal seizure” of Ethereum, once again sparking a regulatory battle.
During the MicroStrategy World 2024 conference held on the 2nd, Michael Saylor further analyzed that other cryptocurrencies, including BNB, SOL, XRP, and ADA, will also be classified as unregistered securities by the SEC.
Michael Saylor, who has always supported Bitcoin, insisted that only Bitcoin has received full institutional recognition. He referred to Bitcoin as the “only universal” institutional-grade cryptocurrency and emphasized that “there will never be another one.”
Previously, MicroStrategy’s Q1 2024 financial report showed that the company had spent an additional $1.65 billion to purchase 25,250 bitcoins since the fourth quarter of last year. In addition to continuing to buy Bitcoin, MicroStrategy has also accelerated the development of its Bitcoin applications. On the 1st, they announced the launch of MicroStrategy Orange, a decentralized identity protocol built on the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol.
The probability of approving an Ethereum spot ETF has greatly decreased. After the approval of a Bitcoin spot ETF in January this year, the market initially had optimistic expectations for the approval of an Ethereum spot ETF. However, in the past few weeks, market optimism has significantly declined. The probability of an approved Ethereum spot ETF on the decentralized prediction market Polymarket is now only 10%. Bloomberg ETF analysts have also lowered the approval probability from over 80% to less than 30%.
The key date for the approval of an Ethereum spot ETF is currently May 23rd, as this is the final deadline for VanEck’s application. It is expected that the SEC will decide whether other Ethereum spot ETFs will be approved by then.
Although Hong Kong has approved the listing of Ethereum spot ETFs ahead of the US, American financial lawyer Scott Johnsson believes that the SEC will reject the application for an Ethereum spot ETF this month and that there is a high probability of no approvals later this year.
Consensys, the parent company of Metamask, filed a lawsuit against the SEC last month in an attempt to prevent the SEC from classifying Ethereum as a security. Consensys presented four reasons to support the argument that Ethereum should not be considered a security, including mentioning that former SEC officials stated in 2018 that Ethereum is not a security.