The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ordered First Trust Advisors and SkyBridge Capital, the hedge fund led by Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House Communications Director under Trump and investor in digital assets, to label their bitcoin (BTC) ETF application as abandoned.
In a notification released on Wednesday, the SEC stated that since the First Trust SkyBridge Bitcoin ETF did not reply to earlier correspondence from the Commission, the registration statement had to be deemed abandoned.
In March 2021, First Trust and SkyBridge submitted their initial application for a bitcoin ETF. In January 2022, the application was denied together with a large number of other unsuccessful applications.
Though BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF application was one of the first to be accepted by the SEC, following some revisions, the two businesses chose not to reapply. The reason First Trust and SkyBridge didn’t reapply after BlackRock’s successful application was mentioned by Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas in a recent X post.