NEW YORK:( news desk)The rollercoster ride in bitcoin since the start of the year has not dampened wealth manager Jim Paulsen’s enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency.BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest asset manager, said on Jan. 21 it was adding bitcoin futures as eligible investments for certain funds. Fund experts expect other asset management firms to follow suit.Yet the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not yet recognize cryptocurrencies as a security like a stock or a bond, and has not ruled whether mutual funds can own them directly, said Robert Jenkins, global head of research at Refinitiv Lipper. So it remains unclear whether any mutual funds currently own bitcoin because they are not required to disclose it, he said.In the United States, eight firms have tried without success since 2013 to create a bitcoin ETF, according to Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF and mutual fund research at New York based CFRA.The SEC did not respond to questions for this article.Funds like the popular ARK Invest ETF line that have positions in bitcoin do it through shares of the Greyscale Bitcoin Trust, a publicly traded trust that holds a set number of bitcoin units and often trades at a premium to the value of its underlying portfolio.Securities regulators in Canada approved the world’s first bitcoin ETF on Feb. 12, leading some investors to hope that U.S. regulators will shortly follow.President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the SEC, Gary Gensler, spoke in broad terms about crytocurrencies in a confirmation hearing Tuesday, suggesting that the agency should provide more regulation on how it views the asset class. Some investors have taken his appointment as raising the likelihood that a bitcoin ETF will be approved for the U.S.