Will Solana ETFs Join Bitcoin and Ethereum? Experts Say SEC Just Entered ‘New Territory’

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday acknowledged an application for a spot Solana ETF, signaling that the agency’s framework for crypto products may soon shift.

Under former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, the regulator had a high bar, only greenlighting applications for Bitcoin and Ethereum products. In recent months, asset managers have expressed a desire to offer similar ETFs covering coins including XRP, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Solana.

Among digital assets that institutions are jockeying to offer products for, Solana is unique. The SEC had alleged in 2023 lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase, two of the industry’s leading exchanges, that Solana traded on their platforms as an unregistered security.

While the SEC has since dropped allegations regarding Solana’s regulatory status in its Binance case, the alleged distinction is still important. Spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs opened the door to a tsunami of Wall Street inflows, but they were approved as commodity-based trusts.

On Thursday, the SEC filed notice of a rule change, proposed by NYSE Arca, that would allow the exchange to list the Grayscale Solana Trust as just that—a commodity-based trust.

The filing acknowledged by the SEC includes a determination that Solana is not a security, pointing to interpretations of SEC guidance, securities laws, and recent court rulings. That’s a small but significant step, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said on X.

“This is the first time an ETF filing tracking a coin that had [previously] been called a ‘security’ has been acknowledged by the SEC,” he said. “So we are now in new territory, albeit just a baby step, but seemingly the direct result of leadership change.”

The SEC could move to approve NYSE Arca’s proposed rule change more rapidly, but the agency can delay its final decision by up to 240 days, or to approximately early October. Approving the rule change would implicitly recognize that Solana is a commodity, but GSR’s Head of Research Brian Rudick told Decrypt that the agency’s process is “pretty nuanced.” 

At the end of the day, “the outcome is mostly up to what the SEC wants to do,” and its recognition of a Solana ETF application doesn’t necessarily mean it will be approved.

If the SEC approves spot cryptocurrency ETFs beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, then it would be a huge deal, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan previously told Decrypt, potentially opening the floodgates for other cryptocurrencies to follow on Wall Street.

For a decade, the SEC denied spot Bitcoin ETF applications, citing fraud and market manipulation concerns. Eventually, following its court loss to Grayscale, the SEC decided that the presence of a regulated futures market for Bitcoin and Ethereum availed those concerns.

Though Coinbase has moved to offer Solana futures regulated under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the application acknowledged by the SEC currently has none to point to.

Instead, the filing cites “U.S.-compliant trading platforms” that are regulated under the New York Department of Financial Services. The state regulator does require firms with a so-called BitLicense to “implement measures designed to effectively detect [and] prevent” fraud and market manipulation, but it’s still unclear whether that’s sufficient enough.

Edited by Andrew Hayward