Asset management giant Invesco has teamed up with Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital to file for a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) for Ethereum (ETH), after they jointly filed for an equivalent Bitcoin (BTC) product in June had.
According to the company’s S-1 registration statement, the Invesco Galaxy Ethereum ETF will “reflect the performance of the spot price of Ether” by holding units of the cryptocurrency with a separate custodian that has yet to be identified. While Invesco is the sponsor, Galaxy Digital is its “execution agent” which will sell ETH to pay the trust’s costs.
This is the fourth Ethereum spot ETF application to land in the SEC’s mailbox in recent weeks, following similar filings from Ark Invest/21Shares, VanEck and Hashdex earlier this month.
The industry has claimed that a spot ETF is the next logical milestone for crypto investing in the US, as the launch of an Ethereum futures product next week is all but guaranteed.
VanEck and Valkyrie were already approved this week, but Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart noted that Bitwise, ProShares, Hashdex and Volatility Shares could hit the market as early as Monday, October 2nd.
First, Valkyrie announced that its Ethereum ETF would begin trading on Friday. But the company ran into trouble with the SEC for purchasing Ether futures contracts before the news was released. The company has since agreed to exit its current position in ETH futures and will only buy back contracts when the fund goes live next week.
While futures ETFs have been approved by regulators, spot crypto ETFs remain out of reach for US investors. Since their application in June, Invesco and Galaxy’s Bitcoin spot ETF application, along with competitors such as BlackRock, Bitwise and Valkyrie, has been delayed twice by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Pressure is now mounting on the SEC after it lost a lawsuit against Grayscale. A federal court found the agency’s repeated rejection of the company’s spot ETF product “arbitrary and capricious” given the agency’s openness to futures ETFs.
Bitwise filed an amendment to its Bitcoin ETF application on Monday to accommodate future SEC rejections of similar products despite its court loss.
Learn Crypto Trading, Yield Farms, Income strategies and more at CrytoAnswers
https://nov.link/cryptoanswers
Comments are closed.