It’s now the open season for US digital assets regulation, and it’s not just because the president-elect released Solana Memocoin on the eve of the inauguration. Currently, IT and other memokine are proposed as new, new multi-term assets in cryptocurrency ETFs. In just a month, the US crypto market has become an absurd amount of absurdity since faced with an absurd amount of obstruction.
While it is hard to imagine a financial advisor saying, “You’re a little short on $Trump Coin,” the reality is that these new currencies could become effective assets for ETFs. Another view is that they are completely useless.
A more generous view is that they are creative forms of expression. Certainly, they are not symphonies by Mozart, but these coins – $bonk, $pengu – are clearly of cultural value. You can see why some investors, retailers and others are interested in this type of ETF.
This makes it essentially the third largest asset in terms of market capitalization and by far the largest Solana when it comes to network use. Bitcoin was originally envisioned as a kind of digital cash, but has emerged as a valuable digital store. And Solana employs the blockchain smart contract mantle with its own historical evidence, with the potential to enhance blockchain-based applications of all kinds. It’s time for the Solana ETF.
Read more: “It’s so fast”: How Solana competes with Ethereum for institutional interest
There is a foundation. It took 10 years and required a lawsuit to get the Bitcoin ETF approved. After more challenges, the Ethereum ETF was also approved using an asterisk. All publishers, including offering “staking” rewards in the application, had to hit it. In doing so, the SEC effectively stated that issuers (and investors) cannot participate in governance of these blockchains, but can invest in them.
As a result, all investors who have purchased Ethereum ETFs since May last year have missed the opportunity to acquire the yields that are directly obtained from supporting the security of the blockchain itself. Instead of ETF stocks, if these investors buy the same amount of Ethereum and bet (e.g., at Coinbase), they can earn, for example, 2-4% APY in exchange for using ETH to keep the blockchain safe. Whatever your politics is, and whether you feel about cryptocurrency, the truth is that this puts American investors at a disadvantage. European investors already have ETPs in other currencies, but they can also staking rewards through them.
Still, in the US, we are still waiting for all sorts of Solana ETFs. And as the publisher has learned not to include it from the Ethereum case, it certainly doesn’t include staking. In my view, approval of European staking ETPs should set a precedent for US staking ETFs.
As for why that staking ETF should be for Solana, the fact that President Memecoin was released in Solana is no coincidence. It is a popular blockchain that can handle billions of transaction volumes, even if unexpected. Its scalability and power necessarily applies to TRADFI’s actual assets, as well as other numbers of actual use cases. Not allowing investors to access to invest in this technology through traditional financial accounts is like limiting investors to invest in Amazon or Google during the initial service. This is why Solana ETFs need to be approved promptly. This is to ensure that a wide range of retail and institutional investors have access to their next biggest assets after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In short, Solana has been postponed due to its own ETF, encouraging the new SEC leadership to approve applications inherited from applications such as Grayscale, Vaneck, 21Share, Canary Capital, Bitwise, and encourages them to rely on proposals. (The Canary application indicates that it has reached the second stage of the SEC review and may be approved in the future.)
It’s still too early, so we still don’t see the long-term impact of this administration’s approach to cryptocurrency. However, there is a possibility that new, better frameworks for crypto assets products can be pushed through. It’s worth the hype.