S-1 registration forms for several Ethereum spot ETF applicants will likely be approved this summer, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler said.
This comes after the agency approved 19b-4 applications from stock exchanges in late May to list such products. All that is needed now is regulatory approval of individual issuer applications, after which a spot Ethereum ETF can immediately go live in the United States.
“Individual issuers are still working through the registration process. That’s going smoothly,” Gensler said Thursday during a Senate hearing. “I imagine that at some point during this summer they will be [aprobados].”
Gensler highlighted how Ethereum futures ETFs had already gone live last summer, and that CME Ether futures had already been around for years.
While there was proven to be very little demand for those futures ETFs, many analysts, including K33 Research, expect the spot products to absorb up to $4 billion in their first five months, representing 20% to 30% of flows into their Bitcoin-based counterparts.
The president’s projected timeline mirrors that of ETF experts at Bloomberg, who said it would likely take “weeks” to “months” before the S-1 documents were approved after the 19b-4 approvals. In any case, the arrival of such funds in the US was a question of “if” and not “when.”
Despite his confirmation, Gensler still did not directly answer whether Ethereum is classified as a security or commodity when asked directly. Legal experts argue that Ethereum has already been implicitly considered a commodity by being approved as a single-asset ETF product.
The SEC chairman also expressed concern about a provision recently included in the agency’s fiscal year 2025 funding bill by the House Appropriations Committee. The stipulation requires that “none of the available funds… be used to carry out an enforcement action related to a digital asset transaction,” unless it is related to fraud or market manipulation.
“It would be a serious setback to our efforts,” Gensler said. “While not all cryptocurrencies are securities… those that are have an obligation to disclose complete, fair and accurate information to the public. We would lose that.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
