Davis Polk partner Joe Hall was recently profiled in Law360 for his work advising Grayscale Investments on the successful uplisting of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust to an exchange-traded fund, or ETF. With $26 billion in assets under management and representing approximately 3% of mined bitcoin, the trust is the largest ETF in the world.

The moment was nearly 10 years in the making. Up until the orders from the SEC came in with the official approval, Joe was “hopeful, but certainly not positive” that the green light was coming.

“A lot of the effort in the past four to five months has been gaming out every possible way that this could unfold, making sure that we had a strategy to counter if it was going in a way we thought would leave us in an unfair position,” Joe explained.

Now that a bitcoin exchange-traded product has made it to the market, Joe noted that he expects those focused on crypto financial products will turn their attention to issuers proposing to hold ether, the token underpinning the ethereum blockchain.

“The challenge there is the SEC has still never said that they agree that ethereum is not a security, and so that I think is where the focus is going to be now,” he said.

“How A Davis Polk Atty Helped A Bitcoin ETF Across The Line,” Law360 (January 11, 2024) 

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