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The spot bitcoin ETF: Here's what happens when it starts trading

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The spot bitcoin ETF: Here's what happens when it starts trading

Representations of cryptocurrency Bitcoin are placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken June 16, 2023. 

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Crypto investors are waiting for the Securities and Exchange Commission to approve a raft of spot bitcoin applications, likely Wednesday

With a spot bitcoin ETF now looking very real, attention is turning to the details of how it will trade, how much it will cost, how much of the runup in bitcoin is due to demand that has been pulled forward, and premium or discount valuations.

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Fees are competitive and will get more so

With nearly a dozen ETFs competing for attention, bitcoin buyers will be very price sensitive, and issuers are already engaged in a modest price war. For example, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, which is partnering with 21Shares to launch a bitcoin ETF, initially announced a fee of 0.8% but on Monday announced no fee for the first six months.

Other issuers are also steeply discounting prices, with several (Bitwise, ARK, Invesco) offering 0% fee for the first six months, while Grayscale is charging 1.5%.

Spot bitcoin ETF fees
Bitwise (GBTC) 0.0% (after first six months: 0.24%)
ARK Invest/21Shares (ARKB): 0.0% (after first six months: 0.25%)
Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO) 0.0% (after first six months: 0.59%)
iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) 0.20% (after first 12 months: 0.30%)
VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL) 0.25%
Franklin Templeton Digital Holdings Trust 0.29%
Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust (FBTC) 0.39%
WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust (BTCW) 0.50%
Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund (BTF) 0.80%
Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) 1.50%

Invesco’s Galaxy Bitcoin ETF has set its expense ratio at 0.0% for the initial six months and the first $5 billion in assets, and goes to 0.59% after.

How will a spot bitcoin trade relative to bitcoin and bitcoin futures?

One of the main questions is how well a spot bitcoin ETF will track bitcoin and bitcoin futures.

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Simeon Hyman, ProShares’ global investment strategist who manages the largest bitcoin futures ETF, the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) that launched in October 2021, noted that bitcoin futures ETFs have tracked bitcoin “fairly well.” But he also told me, “The spot market for bitcoin is still not mature. The futures market is regulated and mature. We’ll have to wait and see how well they track against each other.”

Another issue is whether the bitcoin ETFs will trade at a premium or discount to their net asset value. In this case, the NAV is the value of the bitcoin owned by the ETF. Some are concerned that the creation and redemption process that was agreed upon to create spot bitcoin ETFs could result in a bitcoin ETF trading at a premium to its NAV.

“Some of these ETFs will trade at a premium, and then as investors start to understand the nuances, that’s when we will filter out the nuances and the small points,” Reggie Brown, GTS co-Global Head of ETF Trading & Sales, told Bloomberg.

Most market participants believe that any premiums will be small.

Som Seif runs the Purpose Bitcoin ETF, the first bitcoin ETF to launch in Canada in 2021.

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“Our product trades extremely efficiently, with very tight spreads,” Seif told me. “You should see no impact on trading efficiency. There will be a breadth of players, and the underlying asset is very liquid.”

Matt Hougan, CIO of Bitwise Asset Management, one of the applicants for a bitcoin ETF, agreed: “The underlying market is very liquid,” he told me. “We have been in the market buying and selling bitcoin for years. The main issue are, who gets the liquidity, and who wins on expenses.”

How much money will these ETFs attract?

It’s not clear how much new money will be dragged in once a spot bitcoin ETF trades.

However, two ETF-related events have helped propel interest in bitcoin in the last two years:

1) The beginning in trading of bitcoin futures ETFs (BITO), starting in October 2021, which helped move bitcoin from almost $10,000 in October of that year to over $40,000 by January 2022. The largest bitcoin futures ETF, ProShares bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO), recently passed $2 billion in assets under management, according to ProShares.

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2) Blackrock’s application for a bitcoin ETF on June 16, 2023, helped moved bitcoin from roughly $25,000 to $30,000 in a matter of days.

Brown estimated that the combined ETFs could have fairly significant inflows. “Thirty days out, it could be $2 billion-$3 billion,” he told Bloomberg, estimating it could attract $10-$20 billion in new assets this year.

Still, considering the current market capitalization of bitcoin is near $900 billion, that is not huge inflows. The Canadian spot bitcoin ETF, the Purpose Bitcoin ETF, has about $400 million in assets after over two years.

What’s next?

The next issue, Hougan says, is whether the big institutions and financial advisors will allow their investors to trade bitcoin on their platforms.

“Just because a bitcoin ETF has been launched, it doesn’t mean JP Morgan will get in,” Hougan said.

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After that, Hougan said the next big events will be the bitcoin halving in April, followed by any interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

“Higher interest rates are bad for non-yielding assets like bitcoin or gold,” he told me. “If you get 5% on cash, that’s tough competition.”

A bitcoin ETF approval would be a 'watershed' moment for crypto industry, CEO says

Crypto

Rosen Law Firm Encourages FLOW Cryptocurrency Investors to Inquire About Securities Class Action Investigation

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Rosen Law Firm Encourages FLOW Cryptocurrency Investors to Inquire About Securities Class Action Investigation

NEW YORK, June 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ —

Why: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, continues to investigate potential securities claims on behalf of investors in FLOW (FLOW-USD) cryptocurrency, resulting from allegations that Flow Foundation may have issued materially misleading business information to the investing public.

So What: If you purchased FLOW cryptocurrency you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. The Rosen Law Firm is preparing a class action seeking recovery of investor losses.

What to do next: To join the prospective class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=56767 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action.

What is this about: If you purchased FLOW cryptocurrency on or before December 27, 2025 and held your Flow cryptocurrency through December 29, 2025, please reach out to the firm. There are no out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

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Why Rosen Law: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually litigate securities class actions. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm achieved, at that time, the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs’ Bar. Many of the firm’s attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Contact Information:

     Laurence Rosen, Esq.
     Phillip Kim, Esq.
     The Rosen Law Firm, P.A.
     275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor
     New York, NY 10016
     Tel: (212) 686-1060
     Toll Free: (866) 767-3653
     Fax: (212) 202-3827
     [email protected]
     www.rosenlegal.com

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SOURCE THE ROSEN LAW FIRM, P. A.

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A Four-Armed Robot for Zero-Gravity Work Could Save $140,000 an Hour

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A Four-Armed Robot for Zero-Gravity Work Could Save 0,000 an Hour

Key Takeaways

Meet Helios, a four-armed humanoid from Swiss startup Orbit Robotics built for the hand-over-hand realities of microgravity. With no legs and 28 degrees of freedom, it clings, steadies, and still keeps spare limbs for wrench work and cargo unloading on space stations. The goal is pragmatic: handle maintenance and transport tasks autonomously or by remote control, so astronauts can focus on science. If it delivers, every hour it works could offset the roughly $140,000 price tag of astronaut labor.

A robot built for space-first functionality

Every so often, a design choice feels obvious once you see it. Orbit Robotics, a Swiss startup, has introduced Helios, a humanoid robot tailored for microgravity. No legs, four arms, station-ready. It is built for life inside orbital habitats, the kind NASA and its partners keep supplied and running. Think maintenance checklists, cargo transfers, and the routine work that keeps science humming.

Helios stands apart by treating zero gravity as the default, not an afterthought. In place of walking, it moves hand over hand, anchoring to rails and bulkheads while freeing two arms for the task at hand. The company positions it as an assistant for repetitive jobs that consume astronauts’ hours yet rarely require a human’s judgment.

How Helios was brought to life

Founded in late 2025 out of a Swiss research ecosystem, Orbit Robotics spent its first months building for one environment: space stations. The team publicly introduced Helios in a video released on May 20, 2026, spotlighting a machine that trades terrestrial symmetry for orbital pragmatism. The message was clear: optimize for the station, not for sidewalks.

The startup says it is prioritizing tasks space crews actually face, from routine inspections to cargo stowage. That focus aligns with a broader industry shift as commercial stations and servicing missions move from concept to schedules, including efforts tied to post-ISS planning in the US.

Design tailored to zero-gravity operations

Legs are inefficient in microgravity. Helios uses four coordinated arms to move, stabilize, and work. Two arms can clamp to structure, two can manipulate tools or payloads. The robot can operate autonomously for set routines or accept remote control for complex procedures (teleoperation latency is manageable in low Earth orbit).

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This approach reduces the jostling that can complicate fine tasks in a cramped module. It also mirrors how astronauts already move inside the International Space Station, only with a machine that does not tire during long, repetitive shifts.

Inside the specs: what makes Helios work

Helios is compact at 5.2 feet tall (160 cm) and 70 pounds (32 kg), using aluminum alloy and carbon fiber. It offers 28 degrees of freedom, including 14 in dexterous hands, for precise handling. Power comes from electric actuators with tendon-based transmissions, concentrating motors near the shoulders to keep moving limbs light.

Runtime is 3 hours per charge. Transit speed tops 1.2 miles per hour (2 km/h), plenty for station interiors. The package targets the balance between endurance, agility, and safe interaction with delicate hardware.

The economic case for space robotics

Astronaut time is scarce and expensive. By some estimates, it runs about $140,000 per hour, a figure that balloons when hours stretch into cargo unloading or filter swaps. Helios is built to shoulder those chores so crews can focus on research and mission-critical work.

As commercial stations and lunar infrastructure plans advance, tools that turn checklists into background tasks could shape costs and schedules. This is the case for Helios: not a sci-fi helper, but a practical co-worker tuned for orbit’s everyday jobs.

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Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not — Week In Review

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Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not — Week In Review

After dipping just below the $59,000 level, Bitcoin printed a modest bounce above $63,000 in an attempt to reclaim its 200-week moving average. Ethereum and altcoins continued to bleed and are mostly well in the red as of Friday morning.

Tradfi markets looked similar, with all the major stock indices down on the week, while precious metals resumed corrective moves.

Aside from usual idiosyncratic bear market forces within crypto, there are exogenous factors weighing on digital assets. Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan said this week that she’s increasingly worried higher rates could be necessary later this year, and markets that were recently pricing cuts are now pricing the opposite. For risk assets, which live and die on liquidity, a hawkish pivot is far from ideal. Nor is the dollar still showing strength.

Then there’s oil and the crisis markets seemingly haven’t priced in because it hasn’t detonated yet. It feels like a boiling-the-frog situation. Amena Bakr warned that calling it a potential oil crisis is an understatement, and Bob Elliott put it more bluntly: inventories are drawing down at a pace that risks a serious squeeze within months, even as the market congratulates itself that supply looks slightly better than feared.

On Thursday morning the geopolitical fuse got shorter, with the president announcing the US would be hitting Iran hard and taking Kharg Island, along with plans to assume control of Iran’s oil and gas markets. All risk assets have the millstones of higher rates, a strengthening dollar, and an impending oil shock around their necks, but the one below is only fettering crypto’s.

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The impending mega IPOs are probably the heaviest weight on crypto in the short term. With SpaceX pricing this week (Jim Bianco noted that any Friday pop could make Elon Musk history’s first trillionaire) this all-star IPO season is draining attention and liquidity. Bitcoin and crypto are the most liquidity and attention-sensitive assets in existence.

There’s also the debate whether the AI/space listings mark a top or a turn. The bear case: mega IPOs like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic historically mark cycle tops, and when the AI bubble pops, crypto goes from slow bleed to avalanche. The bull case: trapped bottom-shorters and a rush of liquidity rotating from profit-taking equity holders into BTC could mark the beginning of the recovery. Both can’t be right, and the resolution probably defines the next year.

Within crypto, sentiment and price action remain depressed. The on-chain picture is ugly. TXMC pointed out that long-term holder volume flowing to exchanges has dwarfed daily issuance since 2020. This has traditionally correlated with long-term holders taking profit, but since it has accelerated from the ETFs, it also could imply that the halving no longer matters for the market. Charles Edwards went further, noting we’re watching record institutional selling of Bitcoin, led by ETFs, absorbing over 460% of daily mined supply every day.

The cycle analysts are split on what comes next. Rekt Capital, who has called this bear market nearly beat for beat, says more macro downside is likely and any bounce will be weaker than the last relief rally. Benjamin Cowen observes that this bear market’s price path is so far basically identical to the last three. Cryptoquant put a number on it: a potential bottom near $53,600, bitcoin’s realized price.

The contrarians see green shoots in the carnage. Miners are capitulating, historically one of the most reliable accumulation signals there is. Real Vision’s James Easton sees bullish RSI divergence and a path to $180k by next year.

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Michael Saylor kept the spotlight this week. He told an interviewer that Bitcoin sometimes feels like “risk cubedvolatility as a feature, not a bug. If Bitcoin is risk cubed, then leveraged beta to Bitcoin (say, MSTR) must be Bitcoin to the eighth power. Holders are living through that increased volatility right now: per Arkham, Strategy’s Bitcoin stack has lost roughly $13.5 billion in value since the company posted that celebratory post-earnings dancing video.

Then came Prague. On stage, Mr. Saylor explained the company’s recent sale of 32 BTC with a line for the ages: “I said to you to never sell your Bitcoin. I never said that the company wouldn’t sell its Bitcoin.” Cue videos of him promising to never sell Bitcoin. Austin Campbell has had enough of the whole genre, arguing that between this and the framing of STRC as a money-market equivalent, plaintiff’s attorneys must be thanking God for the gift. He also suggested retail should just buy a BTC ETF, because this ends badly for the bagholders.

Not every treasury company is retreating, though. Tom Lee’s Bitmine somehow keeps finding money, adding another 126,971 ETH worth roughly $213 million and bringing holdings to 5.54 million tokens, about 4.59% of all ETH. Eleven months in, he’s 92% of the way to his “Alchemy of 5%.”

With Bitcoin floundering, it’s no surprise ETH had a rough week too. Mr. Saylor lashed out at Ethereum et al, declaring on stage that confidence in Ethereum has collapsed, SUI collapsed after its “next Solana” hype, and the rest of crypto is fighting over utility. Tether’s Paolo Ardoino took his own victory lap as USDT surpassed ETH in market cap. The stablecoin built on Ethereum was briefly worth more than Ethereum itself.

Aave’s Stani Kulechov tried to reframe the flippening as bullish, predicting that large stablecoins and RWAs will flip ETH’s market cap and that this will be net positive for Ethereum. He declined to elaborate on how this is achievable.

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Meanwhile, the builders kept building. Vitalik and several researchers published a genuinely interesting proposal for building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt, a way to create synthetic exposure to price indices without the liquidation cascades of debt-based designs. Vitalik noted that implementations are already happening, with a strong plea for formal verification before anything hits mainnet.

There were a number of news-worthy AI- crypto stories this week. Citadel published a report arguing that current AI model tokenomics are unrealistically expensive and a shift to cheaper models is inevitable, creating a bifurcation between frontier AI and everyday-usage AI. If correct, that has direct implications for every decentralized compute and inference token on the market. Relatedly, Milk Road ran a comparison of Venice ($VVV) at ~15x revenue versus closest comp OpenRouter, which just raised at 26x. And for a longer read, this candid year-in-review on agentic payments is worth your time if you believe (or want to believe) AI agents transacting autonomously is the next real use case.

AIxcrypto evangelist Algod spent the week trashing the quality of Bittensor subnets, and Bittensor founder const fired back by listing Algod’s own allegedly failed subnets: Kaito, Myshell, Efficient Frontier. Finally, Arthur Hayes unsurprisingly capitulated on WLD at all-time lows.

The rug-adjacent news was relentless. Humanity Protocol was exploited for more than $30 million, with the hacker dumping $H for ETH and the token down ~90%. The timing looked suspicious enough that “exploit” and “exitwere being used interchangeably within hours. On-chain sleuths also revived an old story: analysis suggesting Charles Hoskinson sold 1.5 billion ADA near the 2021 top, close to $3 billion at peak prices, if true.

Sam Bankman-Fried, from his federal prison cell, says he absolutely” wants a presidential pardon from Trump. Kyle Samani was on the receiving end of an absolutely vicious roast that ricocheted around the timeline. And in the week’s strangest plot twist, on attention-starved CT (Crypto Twitter) Hunter Biden became crypto Twitter’s main character, thanking Beeple, putting his art on-chain, accepting Bitcoin as payment, and crediting Andreas Antonopoulos’s The Internet of Money for the orange pill.

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A Biden capturing CT’s rapturous attention can only mean crypto is in the deep doldrums. It’ll be ok, though. Bitwise’s Hunter Horsley provided the best hopium of the week. 2026 will be remembered as a “changing of the guard”, pointing out that when Bitwise launched in 2017, the leading custodians were Xapo and Kingdom Trust, and the dominant exchanges were names like Poloniex, Bittrex, and BitMEX. Almost none of them lead today.

-David Sencil

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