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Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart: The Bloomberg ETF Bros
The two analysts had their fingers on the pulse of one of crypto’s biggest financial stories of 2024.
Updated Dec 10, 2024, 6:43 p.m. Published Dec 10, 2024, 2:36 p.m.
Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart sit on one of the most traditional finance (TradFi if you're hip to the lingo) perches out there: Mike Bloomberg's gazillion-dollar news, data and analysis business. Yet, as all of crypto anxiously awaited word in early 2024 on whether U.S. regulators would approve bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the Bloomberg analysts were must-listen-to experts in crypto.
Their day jobs entail examining all things ETF. For a few weeks or maybe months, there was no hotter story for them than bitcoin, and Balchunas and Seyffart were in the social media trenches, armed with de rigueur memes, telling degens and pros alike whether it was likely to be a "yay" or "nay" for the widely anticipated products. (They correctly leaned toward "yay.")
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Balchunas caught a very early glimpse of how intense the buzz around bitcoin ETFs could get, tweeting way back in 2013: "Crazy: Just the mere reg filing of a bitcoin ETF has already gotten more press/tweets than the dozens of new & useful ETF launches combined.”
Nick Baker
Nick Baker was CoinDesk's deputy editor-in-chief. He won a Loeb Award for editing CoinDesk's coverage of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, including Ian Allison's scoop that caused SBF's empire to collapse. Before joining in 2022, he worked at Bloomberg News for 16 years as a reporter, editor and manager. Previously, he was a reporter at Dow Jones Newswires, wrote for The Wall Street Journal and earned a journalism degree from Ohio University. He owns more than $1,000 of BTC and SOL.
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