In the United States bitcoin has become collateral the derivatives exchanges accept

On 9 December 2025 Ether closed at $3,318, +6.2% against the previous day, and Bitcoin at $92,679.

What changes, in practice

Before the opening, anyone wanting to trade regulated derivatives had to sell their crypto and deposit dollars or government bonds as collateral, losing the exposure to the asset. Afterwards, they can deposit bitcoin, ether or a compliant digital dollar directly and stay exposed to the asset while they trade.

The format is cautious, though. It’s a pilot program, and for the first 3 months only those three are admitted. Participants send a weekly report detailing what they hold for clients, and they have to flag any incident straight away. At the same time, the 2020 advisory that in practice kept digital currencies out of segregated accounts has been withdrawn. It is now described as “superseded”.

Before you get too excited, remember that unregulated platforms have been doing this since 2017. So there’s little that’s new, except that an existing practice moves inside the rules. It makes less noise, but it matters much more: that’s where the money that answers to someone sits.

And the fund that stakes it

Staking, here, means depositing the ether as security for the network and collecting the reward the network pays for it. It’s a real yield. It comes from work someone has to do to keep the network running, and it has nothing to do with accounting tricks.

The point is who does that work. The manager won’t run validators of its own. It will delegate to third-party operators chosen for reliability and uptime, with a main custodian and a backup bank. So whoever buys the shares is buying a yield produced by a chain of delegations in which they can’t see a single link.

How concentrated that chain already is

A listed fund that delegates in turn doesn’t change the decentralization. It adds another layer on top. Whoever buys the shares delegates to the manager, the manager delegates to the operators, and the operators use someone else’s infrastructure. Each step is reasonable on its own. In the end, work that should be spread out concentrates wherever it’s cheapest to do.

I’m not saying the product is wrong, and I don’t want to sound the alarm: it’s the price you pay for convenience. But it’s worth knowing up front. That network is worth something precisely because nobody controls it, and every layer of delegation hands a piece of that promise to someone else.

What was celebrated, and the price

That same day, the company that has made accumulation its business bought another 10,624 bitcoin at an average of $90,615, taking its holding to 660,624. It’s the lighter story of the day, but it also shows how routine this has become: almost a billion dollars spent in a week, and it no longer makes the front page.

And the price, for once, moved: ether closed at $3,318 against $3,124, +6.2%, and bitcoin at $92,679 against $90,634. On almost every day like this we write that the plumbing doesn’t move the chart. This time it did, and the reason is simple: an announcement talks about the future, while accepted collateral changes what you can do the very next day.

Put bluntly: for fifteen years the motto was “be your own bank”, and the most celebrated day is the one on which an agency in Washington gave permission.