By James Rubin
3 min read
Has the hotly anticipated, weeks-delayed flood of spot altcoin exchange-traded fund listings finally begun? Following a trickle of launches in recent days, it appears that many more crypto ETFs are set to begin trading in the coming days.
A Bitwise Asset Management XRP ETF will likely begin trading on the Thursday, Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart wrote in an X post on Monday. Meanwhile, Grayscale and Franklin Templeton funds tracking the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market value could list on Monday, along with a Grayscale Dogecoin ETF, Seyffart wrote.
"Looks like [Bitwise] is going to launch their XRP ETF tomorrow," said Seyffart. "The description page on the Bloomberg terminal is up. Ticker will be XRP."
Decrypt reached out to Bitwise, Grayscale and Franklin Templeton for official confirmation.
The listings would follow a flurry of Solana and XRP fund unveilings over the past three weeks, including Bitwise's Solana Staking (BSOL) and Canary Capital XRP ETFs (XRPC). Solana funds from Grayscale, VanEck, Fidelity, and on Wednesday from 21Shares, have debuted over this period.
The scale of the flows was surprising, with Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Balchunas initially projecting around $17 million for XRPC's debut. But they underscored the growing appetite for crypto-focused investment products following the success of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, and improved regulatory environment for digital assets.
The 11 Bitcoin funds now manage more than $130 billion in assets, with the leader in the category, BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, commanding over half that total, according to CoinGlass, a data provider that tracks the fund space. Nine Ethereum funds oversee more than $18 billion in collective investments.
Issuers from both the traditional finance and digital asset worlds have proposed dozens of ETFs focused on individual altcoins, combinations of tokens, and crypto-focused strategies to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Balchunas told Decrypt earlier this year that he expected the first of these funds to receive an SEC green light in early October, igniting several rounds of likely approvals. SEC adoption of generic listing standards in September appeared to only boost the odds.
But the longest government shutdown in U.S. history delayed processing, and analysts had been reluctant to predict when the ETFs might be available to investors.
"The government shutdown kind of slowed that down, but now that it's reopened, we're finally getting that deluge—so it's totally expected," Sumit Roy, senior analyst at ETF.com, told Decrypt. "We should expect that to continue for the foreseeable future, at least until we have one or multiple ETFs targeting all of the major and mid-tier types of tokens that are out there."
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