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PARIS — Issuers of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds cast doubt over the short-term likelihood of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approving such a product for the cryptocurrency ether . The regulator has a late-May deadline to conclude its review on an ether ETF. That comes after the SEC in March delayed its original deadline for a decision on the ether ETF application. Enthusiasm has been mounting among the crypto community for an ether ETF, ever since the SEC approved the first spot bitcoin ETFs in January. This complicates matters for an ether ETF.

Persons: Cathy Wood, Jan Van Eck, CNBC's Arjun Kharpal, Van Eck, Gary Gensler, Jean, Marie Mognetti, CoinShares Organizations: PARIS, U.S . Securities, Exchange Commission, SEC, Fidelity, Ark, Paris, Invest, CNBC Locations: BlackRock, U.S, Paris, France

PlayStation DualSense controller and PlayStation 5 console are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on April 9, 2022. Here's how Sony did in the June quarter versus Refinitiv consensus estimates:Revenue: 3 trillion Japanese yen ($20.7 billion) versus 2.46 trillion yen expected. Operating profit: 253 billion Japanese yen versus 251.24 billion yen expected. The company previously said it expects to sell a record 25 million PlayStation 5 units in the current financial year, which ends on March 2024 — compared with 19.1 million units in the previous year. Sony sold 3.3 million units of the PlayStation 5 in its April-June quarter, up 38% year-over-year.

Organizations: PlayStation, Sony Locations: Krakow, Poland

So what's hot in fintech right now? One area fintech companies are getting excited by is an improvement to online checkout tools. Callan Carvey, global head of operations at Cleo, said the firm's AI connects to a customer's bank account to get a better understanding of their financial behavior. "A job that typically would take around one or two weeks can now be completed in 30 minutes, right. Several fintech executives CNBC interviewed spoke of how they're not interested in launching products tailored to crypto as the demand from their customers isn't there.

Persons: MacKenzie Sigalos, hasn't, they've, Starling, Richard Davies, Davies, Niklas Guske, —, B2C fintechs, David Singleton, Guske, dazzled, Cleo, Callan Carvey, Carvey, Teo Blidarus, Taktile's, Hiroki Takeuchi, Takeuchi, Changpeng Zhao, they're, Jack Zhang, Zhang, Prajit Nanu, cryptocurrencies, Banks, Nanu Organizations: Bank, fintechs, CNBC, Business, Allica Bank, B2B, Tiger, Schroders Capital, Atom Bank, Schroders, U.S . Securities, Exchange Commission, SEC, U.S, cryptocurrencies Locations: Amsterdam, MacKenzie Sigalos AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, British, Atomico, U.S

Major players are hoping that the SEC and Washington takes, what crypto watchers see as bluffs, seriously and soften the hard line that regulators have taken on the industry. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said last week that the SEC was on a "lone crusade" with its tough actions against certain crypto companies. "The SEC is a bit of an outlier here," Armstrong told CNBC's Dan Murphy in an interview in Dubai. But he's created some lawsuits, and I think it's quite unhelpful for the industry in the U.S. writ large." "The biggest fear of crypto companies is that regulation will cause panic among crypto investors and prices will go down.

An Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game is inserted into the Microsoft's Xbox One video game console arranged in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022. LONDON — Britain's top competition regulator on Wednesday moved to block Microsoft 's acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard . Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard in January 2022 for $69 billion, in one of the biggest deals the video game industry has seen to date. Sony , in particular, has voiced concern with Microsoft's Activision purchase. The Japanese gaming giant fears that Microsoft could make Call of Duty exclusive to its Xbox consoles in the long run.

What is the bitcoin halving? The event cuts the rewards to bitcoin miners — volunteers running specialized equipment to validate transactions on the network and mint new tokens — by 50%. Currently, bitcoin miners receive 6.25 bitcoin for each block they successfully mine. Once the next bitcoin halving occurs, this reward will be reduced to 3.125 bitcoin. This would correlate with the next expected Bitcoin halving date, which is another 378 days ahead."

An Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game is inserted into the Microsoft's Xbox One video game console arranged in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022. Shares of Activision Blizzard surged Friday, after the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority narrowed the scope of its investigation into Microsoft 's takeover of the games publisher. The development marks a partial win for Microsoft, as it pursues an expansion of its video game business. Among its concerns, the regulator flagged that the deal would cause a substantial lessening of competition in the console gaming market. With this new evidence, the CMA now says it no longer believes the transaction will hamper competition in console games.

Google , Netflix , Meta , Apple , Amazon and Microsoft generate nearly half of all internet traffic today. Big Tech firms say this would amount to an "internet tax" that could undermine net neutrality. They bemoaned spending billions on laying cables and installing antennas to cope with rising internet demand without corresponding investments from Big Tech. One suggestion is to require individual bargaining deals with the Big Tech firms, similar to Australian licensing models between news publishers and internet platforms. "The imbalance is not down to Big Tech, it's not down to streamers, and it's not down to telcos.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, on Oct. 19, 2021. "The SEC and Gary Gensler has very outwardly said he views almost all crypto as a security. At a September event organized by the Practising Law Institute, Gensler said that the "vast majority" of cryptocurrency tokens are securities. watch nowThe XRP case has important implications for both Ripple and the broader crypto market. A judgment pronouncing XRP a security could potentially impose much stricter curbs on Ripple with respect to the token.

CNBC rounds up some of the boldest price calls for bitcoin in 2023. Bitcoin miners, who use power-intensive machines to verify transactions and mint new tokens, are being squeezed by the slump in prices and rising energy costs. "In prior down markets, miner capitulation has usually indicated major bottoms," Ayyar told CNBC. However, Mobius told CNBC that he is sticking for his $10,000 price call in 2023. "There will be a managed bull market in 2023, not a bubble -- so we won't see the price overshooting as before," she told CNBC.

But for the past few months, bitcoin's price has bounced stubbornly around $20,000 in a sign that volatility in the market has settled. Large crypto investors with highly leveraged bets like Three Arrows Capital were floored by the pressure on prices, further accelerating the market's drop. Mastercard announced a service that allows banks to offer crypto trading, having previously launched a new blockchain security tool for card issuers. In a note released Thursday, analysts at the bank said there were parallels with bitcoin's trading in Nov. 2018, when prices steadied for a while before rising steadily. Publicly-traded bitcoin miners sold 12,000 bitcoins in June and only around 3,000 in September, according to Goldman Sachs.

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