After the approval and listing of a Bitcoin spot ETF, the timing of when an Ethereum spot ETF will be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has become a market focus. 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.
Last year, financial institutions such as BlackRock, Hashdex, ARK 21Shares, VanEck, and Fidelity submitted a total of 8 applications for Ethereum spot ETFs to the SEC. However, in recent weeks, the SEC has successively postponed the application decision deadlines for Ethereum spot ETFs from Fidelity, BlackRock, Grayscale, Invesco / Galaxy, and others.
James Seyffart, an analyst at Bloomberg, previously pointed out that this is completely as he expected. In the coming months, there will be more delays. Currently, the only important date for Ethereum spot ETFs is May 23rd, as this is the final approval deadline for VanEck’s application.
Regarding the timing of when the Ethereum spot ETF will be approved and listed, U.S. financial lawyer Scott Johnsson tweeted on the 24th, using the approval process of the Bitcoin spot ETF as an example. He pointed out that on September 29th of last year, the SEC issued a preliminary comment letter on the registration statement for the issuer of the Bitcoin spot ETF. About 2 weeks later, revised prospectuses (S-1 documents) began to appear, about 90 days ahead of 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 timetable 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 he believes the SEC does not need to spend a lot of time processing the application documents for the Ethereum spot ETF as it did for the Bitcoin spot ETF. 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. The 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 the SEC approved 9 Ethereum-related futures ETFs last year, it “implicitly” acknowledged that Ethereum is a commodity. This means that the first Ethereum spot ETF is expected to be listed this year.