Asset management company Fidelity has applied for its own Ethereum ETF, just days after BlackRock filed for the iShares Ethereum Trust. A company that manages $4.5 trillion in assets, Fidelity, is the most recent to apply for permission to launch a spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF).
Fidelity has proposed to list and trade shares of the Fidelity Ethereum Fund on the Cboe BZX Exchange, according to a filing it made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 17. The document said:
“According to the Registration Statement, each Share will represent a fractional undivided beneficial interest in the Trust’s net assets. The Trust’s assets will consist of ETH held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust.”
The filing declared that United States citizens lack a low-risk avenue to expose themselves to ETH:
“U.S. retail investors have lacked a U.S. regulated, U.S. exchange- traded vehicle to gain exposure to ETH.”
It also stated that there is a risk of counterparty, legal, and technical issues when using the current methods for gaining access to digital assets.
Meanwhile, it mentioned that regulated exchange-traded products that offer exposure to a wide variety of spot cryptocurrency assets are available to investors throughout Europe.
The first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in Europe, the Jacobi Bitcoin ETF, was authorised to list on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange on August 15.
The application also suggests that losses from now-defunct companies like FTX, Celsius Network, and BlockFi would have been significantly less if an Ether ETF had been accessible to US citizens:
“If a Spot ETH ETP was available, it is likely that at least a portion of the billions of dollars tied up in those proceedings would still reside in the brokerage accounts of U.S. investors.”
Following recent reports that BlackRock formally submitted an application to the SEC on November 16 for a spot Ether ETF, the iShares Ethereum Trust, Fidelity has filed as well.
The iShares Ethereum Trust was registered by BlackRock with Delaware’s Division of Corporations the previous week. This happened nearly half a year after it submitted its application for a spot Bitcoin ETF. Among the companies that have applied for an Ether ETF are VanEck, 21Shares, ARK Invest, Hashdex, Grayscale, and Invesco Galaxy. Fidelity is the seventh company on the list.