Bill Qian, the chairman of Cypher Capital and the former global head of fundraising at Binance Labs, claims that Wall Street corporations and major financial institutions, rather than cryptocurrency enthusiasts, have the greatest interest in promoting the approval of spot Ether tickers down exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
“Wall Street firms are making every effort to ensure the approval of ETFs, rather than native cryptocurrency enthusiasts,” Qian stated in an interview with Cointelegraph.
“In the end, the key lobbyists would be the institutional asset management companies. It is in their best interest to launch the ETF and to get the ETF approved, because they are in a game of the AUM [assets under management], and to increase their AUM, they need to get approval for the ETFs.”
BlackRock, Grayscale, Fidelity, ARK 21Shares, Invesco Galaxy, VanEck, Hashdex, and Franklin Templeton are among the firms contending for a slot Ether ETF.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States has postponed its decision regarding VanEck’s ETF application until May 23. On March 19, it also delayed making a decision about the Hashdex and ARK 21Shares spot Ether ETFs. The last date for a decision on both ETF applications is late May.
Large issuers have a greater stake in the approval of the Ether ETF because they generate ETF-related fees, even though crypto natives would appreciate the news:
“It’s Wall Street firms who want to make this happen to generate an ETF management fee.”
At 1.5 percent, Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF has the highest fee, followed by 21Shares at 0.21%, BlackRock and Fidelity at 0.25%, and Grayscale at 1.5%.
A competition to provide the lowest management costs to clients prompted numerous applicants to make repeated updates to their S-1 forms before to the approval of the spot Bitcoin ETFs.
Of the ten ETF issuers, Bitwise had the lowest expenses, providing ETFs with $1 billion in assets and no fees for the first six months, then a 0.20% fee.
Due to pressure from BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world with trillions of dollars in capital, a spot Ether ETF is “highly likely” to be approved this year, according to Qian.
Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart expects the current Ether ETF approvals to be declined in late May, according to a March 19 X post.