Bullish Opens Daily Bitcoin Auction for ETF Pricing
Bullish, the crypto exchange led by former NYSE President Tom Farley, on Wednesday started the Bullish Closing Cross, a daily call auction producing a single closing price for spot Bitcoin ($BTC). The company described it as the first such auction operated by an NYSE-listed digital asset platform. How ETFs price bitcoin Bitcoin trades 24/7 with no natural close. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, which had about $73bn under management at the end of June, set daily net asset value (NAV) at 16:00 New York time. The largest funds, including BlackRocks IBIT, use the New York variant of the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate. It aggregates volume-weighted trade prices over the one-hour window ending at that time, drawing on a small set of vetted spot exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp and LMAX Digital. When someone creates new ETF shares, they deliver bitcoin to the fund; to redeem shares, they withdraw bitcoin. The value of the bitcoin handed over or taken out is set at the funds NAV, the per-share price the fund publishes at the end of each day. Someone creating shares does not usually hold bitcoin themselves; instead, they buy it on the open market and hand it over to the fund (or sell it when