CoinVoice recently learned that according to The Block, investment management company VanEck has applied to launch a Solana ETF to track the price of Solana's native token. Many analysts said that after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently gave the green light to Ethereum-based ETFs, the market application for Solana ETFs was inevitable, but few doubted that it would succeed in the first place.
“It can’t be done, and I suspect VanEck is building goodwill and laying the groundwork for a future launch,” said Haseeb Qureshi, a partner at investment firm Dragonfly Capital. “But the SEC has made it clear that they believe SOL is a security. This administration is not going to budge on this.” James Seyffart, an ETF expert at Bloomberg Intelligence, agreed, saying on X that the fund “has a chance of launching sometime in 2025 only if there is new management in the White House and at the SEC.”
The biggest legal hurdle facing the SOL ETF is that the SEC’s enforcement division has explicitly stated that SOL is an unregistered security. Notably, this happened a year ago when the agency sued Binance for having a market in Solana and 11 other cryptocurrencies. The SEC’s opinion is based on securities laws passed in the early 1930s and the Howey test, which determines what constitutes a “security investment.” Essentially, if a person invests money in a common enterprise and expects to profit from the labor of others, the SEC can declare that asset a security. [Original link]
