For the last several months there’s really been only one game in the institutional crypto town, and it’s all about those steps to a potential first U.S. Bitcoin ETF

The fact that two of the three Bitcoin ETF filings under active review at the SEC propose to use a CF Benchmarks index as their daily valuation price is welcome, to say the least, and may turn out to be significant.

Three simultaneously launched Ether ETFs underlined their sponsors’ willingness to go head-to-head.

Only Evolve Ether ETF, which uses the CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate as its reference index, is backed by a pricing source with a fully public and transparent methodology.

Evolve ETFs edged ahead of rivals with Friday’s announcement of what’s set to be the world’s first Ether ETF

Ultimately, demonstrating that the BRR continued to meet the most stringent standards of those qualities underpins the stated aim of the research in the first place: to validate the BRR as a superior reference price for providers of regulated Bitcoin financial products, chiefly ETFs.

Crypto attention is already shifting to the next opportunity – a potential direct listing of Coinbase’s best-established rival, Kraken, in 2022

The SEC has been presented with options to demonstrate where it stands on a Bitcoin ETF.

WisdomTree filed an application to offer WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust using the CF Bitcoin Settlement Price (US Close) as its daily valuation index.

Allocations to Bitcoin represented by the regulated Bitcoin Reference Rate have a very similar effect on a 60/40 portfolio as the one evident from previously published research

There’s really no other way to interpret Evolve ETFs’s filing of a preliminary prospectus for the world’s first Ether ETF, powered by the CME CF Ether Reference Rate, than as a vote of confidence.

The market may well have witnessed its biggest single-session drop ever—since the last one a few weeks ago—though institutional crypto convergence continued apace.

From a benchmark perspective, the most important point to make is that the Ether market as represented by CF Benchmarks' Ether instruments, ETHUSD_RR and ETHUSD_RTI, has remained stable and orderly throughout the turbulence.

The clustering towards correlation coefficients of 1.00 demonstrate a strong price correlation between Constituent Exchanges. In turn, the strong price correlation is evidence of a lack of manipulation within Constituent Exchange prices

A more pressing question than ‘where next for BTC’s price?’ was whether the OSC’s resoluteness would encourage the SEC off the fence

Tesla, driving a coach and horses through conventional notions of treasury management, was the main feature.

Although Ether’s market value is still just slightly more than a quarter of the value of the ‘original gangster’, the CME has evidently satisfied itself that an addressable marketplace of institutional Ether participants is as real as the one for Bitcoin.

Our CME CF Ether-Dollar Real Time Index was recorded at $1,761.86, with a 16:08:25 time stamp. That’s certainly the highest the authorised Benchmark has traded since its inception in May 2018.

Bitcoin’s price behaviour is now the closest to what may be described as ‘a range’ for the first time in months.

As if to drive home the lesson that significant crypto adoption news and promising political developments won’t always necessarily coincide with celebratory price action, the two largest cryptocurrencies veered in separate directions this week.

With a CFTC-regulated futures market operated by the CME Group now accounting for the highest BTC-USD open interest, among other elements of a more mature crypto market place than existed in 2017, brave forecasts of what might happen next based on BTC’s trajectory then, are void

Our latest research validates the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR) as a fully compliant benchmark with consistently achievable prices

Several months into this barrage of records, their frequency has not abated to an extent for a serious correction—say $10,000-plus—to appear highly-probable in the near term.