International cross-border bank Standard Chartered reportedly expects US federal regulators to greenlight the offering of a spot Ethereum (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF), months after approving a similar financial product for Bitcoin (BTC).
In a new report, Bloomberg says that Standard Chartered expects the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to rule on the spot on May 23 on Ethereum ETF applications from asset managers VanEck and Ark 21Shares.
The report says Standard Chartered believes the SEC will rule on the said date, just as the regulator did with the approval of 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs on January 10.
Standard Chartered’s head of digital asset research, Geoff Kendrick, says Ethereum and Bitcoin share important legal and financial similarities, making it likely that the spot Ethereum ETF will also be approved.
Kendrick says Ethereum’s price could also rise to $4,000 by May 23 if the second-largest crypto asset by market cap follows Bitcoin’s trading pattern during the ETF approval process.
But the London-based company expects ETH to avoid much of the sell-off that Bitcoin experienced following the ETF approval, when investors sold billions of their Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) shares.
Compared to the amount of Bitcoin in GBTC, Grayscale’s Ethereum trust only owns a small percentage of ETH’s total market cap.
Says Kendrick, according to Bloomberg:
“These factors should make ETH less vulnerable than BTC to a post-approval sell-off.”
ETH is currently trading at $2,283.
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