What happened
The Crypto Council for Innovation, Grayscale Investments and Andreessen Horowitz filed comments with the SEC on Wednesday pushing for a tailored review framework for novel crypto exchange-traded products, according to Decrypt. The letters, addressed to the agency's Division of Trading and Markets and Division of Investment Management, argue that existing fund classifications under the Investment Company Act of 1940 should stay intact.
The groups want the SEC to build a purpose-built lane for products that don't fit the plain-vanilla spot Bitcoin or Ether template already trading. That covers staking-enabled ETH funds, single-asset altcoin ETFs, and multi-token basket products that issuers have queued up since early 2024. The commercial stakes are concrete.
Grayscale converted GBTC into a spot ETF in January 2024 and has watched assets bleed out ever since, with BlackRock's IBIT and Fidelity's FBTC absorbing the flow.
Why it matters
The SEC approved eleven spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 and nine spot Ether ETFs in July 2024. Every application since has moved at glacial pace. Nasdaq, Cboe BZX, and NYSE Arca have 19b-4s pending for Solana, XRP, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and multi-asset basket products, some filed more than a year ago.
The industry read: without a bespoke framework, each novel product will retread the same multi-year approval slog that GBTC and the Ether funds went through. The letters are also a signal to the current SEC. Chair Paul Atkins took over from Gary Gensler in early 2025 and has publicly favored a more accommodative posture on digital assets.