According to British multinational bank Standard Chartered, its digital asset researchers said in a report on Friday that Solana and XRP will soon have their own exchange-traded funds.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved eight Ethereum spot ETFs yesterday. The unexpected and historic move means traditional investors can now buy shares that track the price of the second-largest digital asset. Previously, a Bitcoin spot ETF was approved in January.
Geoffrey Kendrick, head of cryptocurrency research and emerging markets foreign currencies at Standard Chartered Bank, said it is now only a matter of time before other major digital currencies gain ETF wrapper status.
âFor other currencies (e.g. SOL, XRP), the market will also be looking ahead to their eventual ETF status, although that will likely be a 2025 story rather than a 2024 story,â he wrote.
âOther ETH-like tokens (many of which the SEC claimed in its 2023 XRP case) are not securities either.â âIn some cases, the core technology is so similar to ETH that it would be difficult for the SEC to claim they are securities given ETHâs status.â
Industry observers and analysts are pessimistic about the approval of a spot Ethereum ETF this week as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has shown little engagement with asset managers looking to abandon these funds.
Fund managers seeking to launch the products then began frantically filing revised paperwork to get the process underway amid speculation that politics would prompt a change of philosophy. By Thursday afternoon, the SEC had given them the green light.
In 2023, Ripple (whose founder launched XRP) won a partial victory in its lawsuit against the SEC when a judge ruled that programmatic sales of XRP to retail investors did not qualify as securities as the SEC alleged.
Although the judge did rule that the $728 million worth of institutional sales contracts did constitute unregistered securities sales, the industry still interpreted the news as positive.
Under SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, regulators have claimed that many coins and tokens are securities, making it illegal to sell them to investors.
Kendrick added in his report that Ethereum should reach $8,000 per coin by the end of the year.
The bankâs researcher previously said that Bitcoin could reach $150,000 per coin by the end of 2024. He added today that this price remains realistic with the continued success of the ETF.
