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Thursday was the last day of Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit. It also marked Volatility Shares’ launch of two solana futures ETFs — and we even saw Canary Capital file for a Pudgy Penguins fund.
As we try to predict what the SEC may approve next, let’s go over what I heard on the DAS stage and in my chats with executives at some of the biggest issuers.
Bloomberg Intelligence’s James Seyffart said, during a Thursday panel with BlackRock’s Robbie Mitchnick and Nasdaq’s Giang Bui, that futures products are used more as trading vehicles and see less demand than spot products.
“But it’s still very interesting to see, because as we saw with bitcoin and ethereum, if you get a futures product, you’re pretty likely to get a spot product at some point in the future,” he added.
The occasion of CME solana futures going live Monday was viewed as a possible pre-requisite for proposed spot SOL ETFs to get a green light.
Kyle DaCruz, VanEck’s Director of Digital Assets Product, noted CME futures were indeed a way for the Gary Gensler-led SEC to check the “regulated market of significant size” box. But there are paths — beyond futures — to demonstrate that markets are not manipulated, he argued, such as crypto exchanges sharing data with the regulator.
Canary’s filing for a PENGU ETF — to hold both the Pudgy Penguins token and NFTs — is the latest altcoin proposal. Issuers also have live filings for products that would hold XRP, LTC, HBAR, AXL, DOGE, AVAX and others.
Executives noted that while the Gensler-less SEC (with its new crypto task force) is more willing to actively engage about products, the proliferation of altcoin ETF filings shouldn’t be taken as a sign issuers are being told they have a good shot.
Will Peck, WisdomTree’s Head of Digital Assets, told me: “Sometimes people just put stuff forward on the off chance that they could be first.”
Now if BlackRock — the world’s largest asset manager — filed for a specific altcoin ETF, that might be more of a cue.
When Seyffart asked Mitchnick what it would take for the firm to float another crypto ETF, the BlackRock exec gave a rather vague response.
He said client demand is “the number one guiding thing.” He added that building a product — the kind that investors can be sure solves a problem and in a beneficial structure — is “not so easy to do for a lot of these things.”
As for the possible next approvals, DaCruz said in-kind creations/redemptions for existing crypto ETFs and staking for the ETH products are “low-hanging fruits.”
Despite the many altcoin filings, the SEC is likely awaiting possible legislative change (e.g. whether crypto oversight will lie with both it and the CFTC, security status questions, etc).
“I think it’s a hard job for the SEC to take every single crypto asset one by one and say we’ll approve or not approve,” DaCruz explained. “It [would be] much easier if they had a framework…and [could] operate like that.”
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