Fidelity, an asset management firm that oversees $4.5 trillion in assets, has become the latest company to seek approval for a spot Ether (eth) exchange-traded fund (ETF).
in a presentation With the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 17, Fidelity proposes to list and trade shares of the Fidelity ethereum Fund on the Cboe BZX Exchange. The presentation said:
“In accordance with the Registration Statement, each Share will represent a fractional undivided beneficial interest in the net assets of the Trust. The assets of the Trust will consist of eth held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust.”
Update: @Fidelity joins the place ethereum?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#ethereal ETF Race filing a 19b-4 with @CBOE https://t.co/rxNEzpzh3g pic.twitter.com/o96XspPDEP
-James Seyffart (@JSeyff) November 17, 2023
The presentation stated that US citizens lack a low-risk avenue to expose themselves to eth:
“US retail investors have lacked a regulated, publicly traded vehicle to gain exposure to eth.”
Furthermore, he argued that existing methods to access digital assets involve facing counterparty risks, legal uncertainty and technical risks.
Meanwhile, he noted that investors across Europe have access to products that trade on regulated exchanges and provide exposure to a wide range of spot crypto assets.
Related: BlackRock Maintains SEC Has No Reason to Treat crypto Futures and Spot ETFs Differently
On August 15, Cointelegraph reported that the first European bitcoin (btc) spot ETF, the Jacobi bitcoin ETF, was approved for listing on Amsterdam’s Euronext stock exchange.
Additionally, the filing proposes that if an Ether ETF had been available to US citizens, the losses suffered by now-defunct companies like FTX, Celsius Network, and BlockFi would be considerably lower:
“If a Spot eth ETP were available, it is likely that at least some of the billions of dollars tied up in those proceedings would still reside in the brokerage accounts of US investors.”
Fidelity’s filing comes after recent news that BlackRock officially filed for a spot Ether ETF (iShares ethereum Trust) with the SEC on November 16.
The previous week, BlackRock registered the iShares ethereum Trust with the Delaware Division of Corporations. This occurred almost six months after it submitted its bitcoin Spot ETF application.
Fidelity is the seventh company to file for an Ether ETF, among a list of companies that include VanEck, 21Shares, ARK Invest, Hashdex, Grayscale, and Invesco Galaxy.
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