Yesterday BlackRock presented to the SEC an update on its request to issue an ETF on Ethereum spot, after last week’s approval.
The expert on ETF from Bloomberg, Eric Balchunas, while maintaining the hypothesis that the actual landing on the USA stock exchanges will only happen around July 4th, states that he is starting to consider the hypothesis that the landing could happen at the end of June.
Summary
The failure to land
Spot Bitcoin ETFs have landed on US exchanges the day after their approval by the SEC.
In fact, on January 10 of this year, they were approved, and on the 11th they were already tradable.
For the ETF on Ethereum spot, however, the path is different.
The key point seems to have been a real political intervention.
The SEC initially had rejected the ETF su Bitcoin spot, and was forced only at a later time to approve them thanks to a court ruling that had condemned the previous rejection.
From the moment the ruling arrived, which the SEC decided not to appeal, to the moment the deadlines for ruling on the new requests expired, including that of BlackRock, several months passed. During those months, the applicants had all the time to complete an entire procedure that goes from the request for approval to the actual listing on the stock exchange.
Instead for Ethereum things went differently.
BlackRock: The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs
The SEC in recent years had not hidden considering ETH a security (unregistered) particularly because of staking. Instead, on the nature of Bitcoin as a commodity, it has never had any doubt.
Given that at first it had rejected the spot Bitcoin ETFs, many expected that for this reason, and for the aforementioned one, it would opt for an initial rejection of the spot Ethereum ETFs, then deferring to a court the task of determining whether such a procedure was correct or not.
Instead, things did not go that way.
The hypothesis that seems most plausible is that the SEC received an explicit and peremptory political request not to stand in the way this time.
In the USA, they are in the midst of the election campaign for the November presidential elections, and the democratic administration of Joe Biden in this regard has opted for a change of course towards cryptocurrencies.
Tale cambio di rotta però è avvenuto solo di recente, in particolare dopo la palese apertura di Trump nei confronti del mondo crypto, pertanto anche la richiesta perentoria alla SEC è arrivata all’ultimo.
However, this change of course has only occurred recently, particularly after Trump’s clear openness towards the crypto world, therefore the peremptory request to the SEC also came at the last moment.
The agency had to express itself on the matter by May 23, and so it did. However, until a very few weeks ago, it was probably not ready to proceed in that direction, also because President Gary Gensler has long been close to the anti-crypto positions of a part of the U.S. Democrats.
When Biden’s diktat arrived, the SEC had to scramble and hurry so as not to reject the requests for spot Ethereum ETFs even though they were not yet ready to land on the markets.
The update from BlackRock on the spot Ethereum ETF
Anche in questo caso, come fu per gli ETF su Bitcoin spot, il punto di riferimento è BlackRock.
Ieri finalmente BlackRock ha presentato alla SEC il Form S-1 sul suo iShares Ethereum Trust, senza il quale l’ETF non potrebbe sbarcare sui mercati.
Questo sembra accelerare il passo rispetto alle tempistiche previste in precedenza, anche se la procedura è ancora lungi dall’essere completata.
The hypothesis is that it will take several more weeks before all the obligations required by law are fulfilled, and therefore it is not possible to imagine an actual listing on the stock exchange in the first half of June.
A dire il vero, probabilmente per prudenza, l’ipotesi che veniva data come più probabile era per l’appunto uno sbarco ai primi di luglio, ma la situazione reale sembra evolvere un pochino più rapidamente del previsto. A questo punto gli ETF su Ethereum spot potrebbero essere scambiabili sulle borse USA forse già a partire da fine giugno.
Among other things, in the document presented to the SEC yesterday, BlackRock also revealed that a “Seed Capital Investor” has already purchased 400,000 shares of the ETF.
The other ETF
The procedure for the total and definitive approval of spot Ethereum ETFs so that they can effectively land on the stock exchange seems to be proceeding in parallel for all requests.
Furthermore, the SEC, in order not to show favoritism, has so far always approved all similar requests in bulk, so the timing for the stock market debut of the other ETFs should be more or less the same.
Perhaps there could be one or two days of delay for some of these ETFs due to mere technical issues, but it is likely that all the main ones will be listed on the stock exchange on the same day.
