It’s been more than a decade since the idea of bringing bitcoin to the masses was but a twinkle in the Winklevoss twins’ eyes. Bitcoin, of course, is much easier to buy than it was when Barack Obama was president, but the fees, delays, and existential risks of crypto exchanges have made the investing public wait — and wait — for an easy, relatively cheap way to buy into the digital currency — usually in the form of an exchange-traded fund. ETFs, as they’re generally known, are a $7.7 trillion industry, making them one of the world’s most popular ways to invest. They’ve been around for 30 years, a kind of (usually) cheaper evolution of the mutual fund, and are deeply ingrained in the way people around the world make, and lose, money on Wall Street. At the heart of it, these funds are just ways to buy and sell more complex investments in exactly the same way you might buy and sell a single company’s stock. If you want to buy gold, or a given category of bonds, or even just stick it to Jim Cramer, you could use an ETF to do it — except if you wanted to buy bitcoin.

That all looks like it’s about to change. There’s been a flurry of activity in recent days among securities regulators, stock exchanges, and some of the industry’s biggest money managers to finally usher the digital currency into another age — one in which it’s as easy to make it a part of your 401(k) or brokerage account as anything else. The companies getting involved here are household names, and not just for people who have their own pet theories about what happened to Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s pseudonymous (and apparently disappeared) creator. Industry giant BlackRock is among the companies that appear to be in position to make the first offerings, which could trade on exchanges like Nasdaq. This has led to a boom not just of bitcoin’s price but of some digital currencies that were all but left for dead after their close association with convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. “If you’re worried about little people getting hurt in this stuff, you would want these big, reputable firms to be involved. We’ve always said the ETF is SBF-proof,” said Eric Balchunas, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence who’s been monitoring the creation of the crypto fund. He predicts there’s a 90 percent chance that the ETF will be available next month.

So what happened? If you take a look at the details of the Winklevoss twins’ very first proposal for a bitcoin ETF, and the ones that are being proposed today by BlackRock and other big firms, they are “not really” all that different, Balchunas said. What changed was a big loss in court in August, when a judge ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission was arbitrarily preventing another massive crypto player, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, from offering its ETF in the U.S. (It’s currently available in Europe and other markets.) The S.E.C., which is led by chairman Gary Gensler, has been a bogeyman for the crypto industry in large part because of the roadblocks it has set up against the creation of these kinds of funds. For a long time, the regulators said they were concerned about market manipulation; about investors losing money. But after the start of the pandemic, when digital currencies of all stripes caught traction with the public — and, not to mention, they had okayed an ETF of bitcoin futures contracts — the argument became less than tenable.

There has been a real change in the mood around crypto over the last few months. This fall, Bankman-Fried, the former FTX CEO, was found guilty. Then his counterpart at Binance, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and stepped down from the company. Su Zhu, the founder of Three Arrows Capital, crypto’s biggest hedge-fund flameout, got arrested; Do Kwon, the guy whose spectacular collapsed presaged all the other reckonings, is on the verge of getting extradited to New York to face federal charges for financial crimes.

Following all these legal proceedings, and the interest from institutional giants like BlackRock, it has seemed sometimes that bitcoin is on the verge of going corporate. Balchunas pointed out that you could even see the market psychology in play in the way that some of these ETFs are named. While VanEck uses the crypto slang term HODL as the ticker for its fund, BlackRock is using the much more sober-sounding IBIT. “When it comes to, like, the 75-year-old boomer or a wealth manager, bitcoin is crazy enough. The ticker should almost offset a little bit of the volatility,” he said.

That the new ETF is probably almost here was confirmed this week, as public filings have made it clear that the SEC is getting very involved. Here’s James Seyffart, also an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said:

Speaking as someone who’s neither a regulator nor a financier, that would be a lot of meetings in a short period of time for something that wasn’t going to happen. There have also been technical changes to the way people will be able to invest in the ETFs, which appear to be one of the final hurdles. “Based on information that’s come in in the last 24 hours, it looks like they’ve given informal approval,” Balchunas said.

For the bitcoin set, the timing of an approval could be a giant boon. Wall Street has all but placed its bets that the Federal Reserve will avoid a recession, with the first cuts to interest rates expected around March, market data show. The everything rally that’s been going on for the last few weeks could certainly creep into crypto ETFs. Balchunas expects there will be about $55 billion to $60 billion invested in these ETFs by the end of the next two or three years. This is far from a guarantee that people wouldn’t lose money — the digital currency is notoriously volatile, and it’s unlikely that new funds would change that about it. But for people who just want to gamble a little bit, why not? “It is a bridge between the crypto underworld and the traditional finance world — and the baby-boomers of America who have a lot of money,” Balchunas said.