The Securities and Exchange Commission has green-lighted the listing of eight spot Ether exchange-traded fund on U.S. stock exchanges, approving the asset manager’s 19b-4 form on Thursday afternoon. "It's one of the biggest regulatory 180s in recent SEC history,” VanEck’s head of digital asset research, Matthew Sigel, told Fortune in a statement. Issuers include BlackRock, VanEck, Fidelity and Grayscale, among others.
The agency’s relative silence over the pending applications in recent months led many in the cryptocurrency industry to regard an approval this year as a pipe dream. Bloomberg analysts were predicting the odds of approval to be as low as 25% as late as Monday afternoon. But then, in a sudden turn of events, on Monday, CoinDesk first reported that the issuers were “abruptly” asked by regulators to update their 19b-4 filings on an accelerated basis. Since then, at least eight of the nine issuers have done so—and Bloomberg's experts raised their projection to 75%. The price of Ether has soared 25% since Monday, trading at $3,855 as of 5:13 p.m. EST.
