BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has filed a form S-1 registration for a spot Ethereum ETF with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In the filing, the asset manager notes that the Trust “seeks to reflect generally the performance of the price of ether” with crypto exchange Coinbase serving as the custodian for its crypto holdings.
Earlier this month, BlackRock outlined its proposal for the Ethereum ETF in a filing with the Nasdaq stock exchange, and registered a trust for Ethereum in Delaware.
BlackRock’s Ethereum ETF filing follows the asset manager’s application for a spot Bitcoin ETF in June 2023, a move that rocked the crypto and TradFi worlds and kicked off a crypto market rally that propelled Bitcoin to its current price of almost $38,000. To date, the SEC has rejected every application for a spot Bitcoin ETF.
At time of publication, Ethereum’s price stands at $2,069, up 2.7% on the day.
During his term as SEC chair, Gary Gensler has repeatedly refused to confirm whether the regulator considers Ethereum a security or a commodity, though in 2018, while a professor at MIT, he stated that the SEC considered the cryptocurrency “sufficiently decentralized” that it doesn’t qualify as a security. At the time, Gensler appeared to be reflecting the opinion expressed by the SEC’s former Director of Corporate Finance William Hinman in his much-cited “sufficiently decentralized” speech of June 2018.
