Cboe Pulls VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF Proposal as SEC Shutdown Stalls Talks

The dated record

On January 23, 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published Release No. 34-84988, recording that Cboe BZX Exchange had withdrawn its proposed rule change to list and trade SolidX Bitcoin Shares issued by the VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust. The SEC said BZX informed the agency of the withdrawal on January 22. The notice ended that specific rulemaking docket without an approval or a disapproval.

That distinction is central. BZX—not the SEC—terminated the proposal, and the one-page notice gave no reason. The action did not authorize a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, reject the trust on its merits, or change bitcoin’s legal status. It removed a closely watched route for placing bitcoin-backed trust shares on a U.S. national securities exchange.

A decision deadline disappears

The proposal had been pending since BZX filed it on June 20, 2018. It was published for public comment on July 2, and the SEC opened proceedings on September 20 to decide whether it should be approved or disapproved. In a December 6 order, the Commission said it had received more than 1,600 comments and extended its decision deadline to February 27, 2019—the 240th day after publication.

Withdrawal therefore mattered procedurally as much as commercially. It erased the approaching deadline for this docket and left the Commission without having to issue a merits order. For market institutions, the unanswered questions were the same ones embedded in the SEC’s September proceedings: whether the exchange’s rules were designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative practices and protect investors and the public interest.

The proposed trust was important because it sought to place bitcoin exposure inside the familiar infrastructure of exchange-listed securities. Approval could have allowed eligible brokerage customers to buy and sell shares through conventional market plumbing instead of acquiring and safeguarding bitcoin directly. On January 23, however, that institutional bridge remained proposed rather than operational.

Shutdown explanation was a sponsor claim

VanEck chief executive Jan van Eck told CNBC on January 23 that the partial U.S. government shutdown had interrupted discussions with SEC staff about custody, market manipulation and pricing. He said the proposal had been pulled so the parties could refile and resume discussions when the agency was operating again. CoinDesk and Fortune reported those remarks the same day.

That explanation was attributable to the sponsor, not a finding in the SEC withdrawal notice. It also did not establish how the Commission would have ruled by February 27. Van Eck acknowledged in the interview that rejection remained possible and argued that the sponsors had answers they still needed to demonstrate to regulators. The verified record therefore supports “withdrawn during stalled talks,” not “withdrawn after SEC approval became likely” or “rejected because of the shutdown.”

Market meaning and limits

The immediate signal was institutional delay. A prominent exchange, asset manager and bitcoin-product sponsor no longer had an active proposal approaching a final SEC deadline. The development underscored that a regulated wrapper depended not only on product design, but also on surveillance, custody, pricing and the regulator’s ability to examine those claims.

No price, return, volume or market-capitalization figure is used here. Contemporaneous coverage described limited immediate price impact, but surviving venue snapshots use different exchanges, time zones and intraday windows; they cannot isolate the withdrawal from other trading factors. The defensible conclusion for January 23 is narrower: the pathway represented by SR-CboeBZX-2018-040 closed without a merits decision, while any promised refiling remained a future action rather than a completed filing.