The syndicate was organized by SecondMarket, but it has nothing to do with SMBIT.
In principle, SMBIT should buy bitcoin only when some investor buys SMBIT fund shares. After months of stagnation, there were some large buys by SMBIT over the past month.
What are large buys exactly?
And where is this info listed.
BIT should go live very very soon. I think Barry held off to get this batch of coins cheaply before BIT goes live and drives the price up significantly.
I also think this is what gave Barry Silbert the guts to bid higher than everyone else; he knows BIT is a done deal.
Check page 1 of this thread. user @jl2012 has been tabulating and interpreting the data posted by SMBIT on their site.
You may be confusing Barry Silbert's SMBIT fund with the Winklevoss twins' COIN ETF.
The COIN ETF is still waiting for approval by the SEC. No expected date for a decision.
SMBIT has been alive since 2013-09-25, but is not traded on any open market. A client has to buy SMBIT shares in dollars from the company that manages the fund; the company then buys BTC for him (1 share = 0.1 BTC, at the current BTC market price) and keeps them safe. After six months the client has the option to continue holding the shares or to liquidate them, i.e. sell them back to the company for dollars (still 1 share = 0.1 BTC at the current BTC market price; minus some storage and processing fees). Clients are not allowed to sell the shares to anyone else.
SMBIT had promised that "soon" there would be some open market for their shares, so that clients could trade them among themselves. I believe the original promised date for that was Q2 2014; is this right? That hasn't happened yet. (Is that what you meant by "go live"?)