Companies ranging from BlackRock to Fidelity to VanEck, which issued a spot bitcoin ETF this year, are awaiting approval for their ether products.
Some issuers are not confident that the SEC will greenlight Ether applications.
“We were the first company in the U.S. to apply for Ethereum, and we [Ark Invest CEO] “I think Cathie Wood is the leading candidate for May who is likely to be rejected,” she said at the Paris Blockchain Week crypto event in Paris, France. , VanEck CEO Jan Van Eck told CNBC's Arjun Karpal.
Ark Invest did not immediately respond to a request from CNBC for comment.
“The legal process is that regulators will comment on your application, which has been happening for weeks before Bitcoin ETFs came out, and now as far as Ethereum is concerned. , the number of pins is decreasing,” Van Eck added.
Enthusiasm for Ether ETFs has been growing among the crypto community since the SEC approved the first Spot Bitcoin ETF in January. However, the SEC has indicated that it may be less enthusiastic about approving such investment products.
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has previously emphasized that the SEC's view is that “the vast majority of crypto assets are investment contracts and therefore subject to federal securities laws.”
This complicates matters for Ether ETFs.
“We are watching the Ethereum decision very closely,” CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti told CNBC on Tuesday. “CoinShares did not participate in the Bitcoin ETF race until three months before approval, but managed to qualify at the last minute.”
He was equally pessimistic about the chances of such approval in the near term.
“I don’t think anything has been approved this time of year,” he said, suggesting it could be difficult to get SEC approval for proof-of-stake, a blockchain-specific protocol. .
Bitcoin is backed by another protocol known as proof of work, in which volunteer miners verify transactions and mint new tokens.
The SEC does not take issue with proof of work from a securities law perspective.
