Solana ETF proposal aims to be the first in North America

With the Bitcoin spot ETF firmly established in the U.S. and an Ethereum spot ETF imminent after initial approval late last month, a new offering for the Solana ETF emerged in Canada on Thursday.

Canadian investment fund manager 3iQ announced that it has filed for an offering for the Solana Fund (QSOL). If approved, “it will be the first Solana exchange-traded product to be listed in North America,” he said.

With a market capitalization of $61 billion at the time of this writing, Solana (SOL) ranks fifth behind Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), dollar-pegged Tether (USDT), and Binance Coin (BNB). It’s a big cryptocurrency.

3iQ said the fund will be offered on the Toronto Stock Exchange “in connection with an initial public offering.”

“Solana funds provide easy exposure to SOL without the technical complexity,” the company wrote. “As part of our investment strategy, the Solana Fund will stake SOL to earn rewards.”

The company already offers ETFs based on Bitcoin and Ethereum, but its move to support Solana adds weight to speculation about which cryptocurrencies U.S. regulators will approve for such funds.

British bank Standard Chartered predicted that Solana and XRP would be the next coins to receive ETF treatment approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“The core technology is so similar to ETH that it is often difficult for the SEC to argue that it is a security, given ETH’s position,” said Geoffrey Kendrick, head of cryptocurrency research at Standard Chartered.

William Quigley, co-founder of Tether and WAX, agrees, recently saying: decryption Fund managers will inevitably move to the “next hot new thing,” with Solana as a possible option.

“Anytime Wall Street packages a new product to sell to consumers, you can bet that if that product is successful, there will be imitators,” he said, noting that Bitcoin spot ETFs are seeing a huge influx of investment. “We will continue to see new ETFs being launched until there is a major decline.”

“Canada discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs before the U.S. even had futures ETFs for both assets,” Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart said on Twitter. He also pointed out that the Solana fund is not new globally.

“You’d be shocked to learn that we already have over $1 billion worth of Solana ETPs held elsewhere in the world,” he tweeted, including a list of funds from providers such as 21Shares, VanEck and WisdomTree. .

In the United States, there is great interest in the launch of the spot Ethereum ETF, which received unexpected approval from the SEC last month. Bitwise debuted a TV ad promoting Ethereum earlier today, and analysts predicted the fund would become active on July 2nd.

Editor: Andrew Hayward