I reckon there won't be any approval for a Bitcoin ETF this year, specifically not by the end of December. I believe it's more likely to happen someday in January 2024, as that's the final deadline for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to approve Bitcoin ETF proposals for immediate trading. This could be a significant boost for the cryptocurrency market overall and Bitcoin in particular at the beginning of 2024. The likelihood of the SEC continuing to postpone and not approving at this point is quite low, which might lead to legal issues between the SEC and major entities like BlackRock, Grayscale, or Ark Invest.
This year? Maybe you are not following the news, everyone knows this already and it has been finalized that if it would not be approved in November this year at the height of the tension, it would be shifted to January next year which everyone has focused upon ever since then. The actual date of the approval or the confirmation for it should be on the 10th of January, and this is another fateful day that will again shape and determine where crypto assets will be heading. As for the approval itself, I can't say much about it because it is either SEC approves it or rejects it. But the fact that the court has sided in the favour of ETF ruling, the SEC might not have much reason to reject it. Come to think of it, if you have been following the case from the beginning, you might have known that the SEC doesn't have a valid reason for rejecting the ETF, they were only "beating around the bush," only for the reason best known to them, perhaps, the top guys there are anti-crypto. In my opinion, it is best to strictly regulate cryptocurrency and its related products than to outrightly reject it for any reason.