After the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF, the application for the Ethereum spot ETF has become a market focus, as to when it will be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Scott Johnsson, a U.S. financial lawyer, analyzed on the 24th that if the Ethereum spot ETF is not approved by May 2024, it will be approved no later than mid-2025.
Financial institutions such as BlackRock, Hashdex, ARk 21Shares, VanEck, and Fidelity submitted a total of 8 applications for Ethereum spot ETFs to the SEC last year. However, in the past few weeks, the SEC has successively postponed the application deadlines for Ethereum spot ETFs from Fidelity, BlackRock, Grayscale, and Invesco/Galaxy.
Analyst James Seyffart from Bloomberg previously pointed out that this is exactly as he expected, and there will be more delays in the coming months. Currently, the only important date for Ethereum spot ETFs is May 23rd, as this is the final approval deadline for VanEck’s application.
As for when the Ethereum spot ETF will be approved, U.S. financial lawyer Scott Johnsson tweeted on the 24th, using the example of the Bitcoin spot ETF to analyze. He pointed out that on September 29th last year, the SEC issued a preliminary letter of opinion on the registration statement of the issuer of the Bitcoin spot ETF, and about 2 weeks later, revised prospectus (S-1 documents) began to appear, about 90 days before the final approval deadline on January 10th.
Now, there are exactly 90 days left until the final approval deadline for the Ethereum spot ETF on May 23rd. In Scott Johnsson’s view, there are many reasons to believe that the SEC may deviate from the approval timeline of the Bitcoin spot ETF but will still approve the Ethereum spot ETF, including delaying the entire S-1 review process until after the approval of the proposed changes to the securities exchange rules (19b-4 documents).
James Seyffart responded that SEC does not need to spend a lot of time processing the application documents for the Ethereum spot ETF, similar to how they dealt with the Bitcoin spot ETF application. Although the two are different, the difficulty of processing the Bitcoin ETF application from 0 to 1 is much greater than that of processing the Ethereum ETF application from 0 to 1. SEC can establish a considerable foundation in the Bitcoin ETF application.
James Seyffart is optimistic about the approval of the Ethereum spot ETF. He stated last month that when SEC approved 9 Ethereum-related futures ETFs last year, it “implicitly” acknowledged that Ethereum is a commodity, which means that the first Ethereum spot ETF is expected to be listed this year.