If you've been living under a rock and have no idea what's going on, check out this post.
The deadline for the SEC to make a decision is today, January 10.
Yesterday, the SEC published a post on X mentioning that the BTC ETF had been approved, which caused a huge pump in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. A few minutes later, Gary Gensler posted on his personal account saying that the SEC account had been compromised and that the news were fake, causing a huge dump. Both of these event liquidated a lot of money. It all came to be a fake news event.
SEC account compromise Timeline:
15:11 — @SECGov tweets all #Bitcoin ETFs are approved.
15:26 — @GaryGensler says SEC account was hacked.
15:38 — SEC “regains control” of their account & deletes original tweet.
15:42 — SEC tweets they were hacked & have not approved ETFs.
Fishy?
Ok so first things first, the wording is interesting. Gary never said the SEC's account was compromised by an external hacker. It could have been compromised by internal incompetence.
The first interpretation by the crypto space was that the SEC account had been hacked, but if you look at the wording, and then the timeline, it's very clear that it wasn't a hack.
It takes months, dozens of support tickets, reaching out to people inside X to recover a hacked account on X. Granted, the SEC would have a fast pass and would recover it faster, but not in a matter of minutes.
A good guess is the SEC scheduled the announcement in their account to go out on the 10th and messed up, and the intern messed up the date so the post went out a day earlier; or it might have been a fat finger mistake, who knows?
A few hours later, Elon Musk confirmed that the account was compromised due to a SIM swap and that the SEC account didn't have a 2FA security measure.
But then some people started to notice that the SEC account was liking some of the meme replies the first announcement got. This goes completely against the normal behavior the SEC account has, and it strengthens the theory that the bad actor was an outside entity and not a fat finger or a draft post that went out earlier than planned.
So what was it?
There's a theory that the SEC orchestrated all of this, and there's two main reasons that do not cancel each other:
Now the latter would be just an excuse to reject the BTC ETF. A mere excuse, because traditional markets react harder to smaller news. Let's say Elon Tweets that he's selling X, the stock price could drop by double digits in a matter of minutes. So yeah, this would just be an excuse, but a strong enough excuse for Gary to pull it off, even if it meant antagonizing billions of dollars from Blackrock, Greyscale, Ark, and many more.
