The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday approved applications from Nasdaq, CBOE and NYSE to list exchange-traded funds (ETFs) linked to the price of .
The move will potentially allow these products to begin marketing later this year. While ETF issuers still need final approval before launching, Thursday's decision marked an unexpected victory for these companies and the cryptocurrency industry, which, until Monday, had anticipated the SEC would reject the filings.
Commenting on the event, TD Cowen analysts said they were “surprised by the timing, but not by the outcome.”
“Approval has been inevitable for some years. We believe this clears the way for more crypto ETFs, although it does not represent a change in the SEC's approach to cryptocurrencies. “We still hope that he will initiate litigation against tokens and trading platforms,” they added.
TD Cowen notes that the SEC approval came about six months earlier than expected. The broker had anticipated that the agency would wait a full year after the ETF launch before considering Ether ETF applications and could delay any litigation until early 2025.
However, approval became inevitable after the SEC sanctioned crypto futures ETFs and subsequently the Bitcoin ETF () earlier this year, making a legal challenge unlikely.
VanEck, BlackRock (NYSE 🙂, Fidelity, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, ARK 21Shares, Invesco Galaxy and Bitwise were among the first group of companies to gain approval. They had to agree that Ether held in the ETFs would not be used for staking.
The next step is approving S-1 requests, which can take several weeks or more, the TD Cowen team said.
“That said, we do not see this as an insurmountable obstacle,” the analysts wrote.
“Our view is that ETFs reflecting a basket of tokens will also be approved within a year, although we will be watching to see if the initial baskets are just Ether and Bitcoin or whether they include other tokens,” they added.
