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Fidelity seeks green light for Ethereum ETF, following BlackRock filing

3 weeks ago
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Fidelity, an asset management firm overseeing $4.5 trillion in assets, has become the latest company to seek approval for an Ethereum (ETH) spot exchange-traded fund (ETF).

In a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 17, Fidelity proposes to list and trade shares of the Fidelity Ethereum Fund on the Cboe BZX exchange.

“According to the registration statement, each share will represent a fractional undivided beneficial interest in the net assets of the Trust. The assets of the Trust will consist of ETH held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust.”

The filing states that US citizens do not have a low-risk way to gain exposure to ETH:

“US retail investors lacked a US regulated and exchange-traded vehicle to gain exposure to ETH.”

He further argued that existing methods of accessing the digital asset involve counterparty risk, legal uncertainty and technical risk.

At the same time, he noted that investors across Europe have access to products that trade on regulated exchanges and provide exposure to a wide range of spot crypto assets.

Related: BlackRock Says SEC Has No Reason to Treat Crypto Futures and Spot ETFs Differently

On August 15, Cointelegraph announced that the first European spot Bitcoin ETF, the Jacobi Bitcoin ETF, had been approved to go live on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange.

Additionally, the filing proposes that if an Ether ETF had been available to U.S. citizens, the losses suffered by now-defunct companies like FTX, Celsius Network, and BlockFi would be significantly lower:

“If a Spot ETH ETP were available, it is likely that at least a portion of the billions of dollars stuck in these proceedings would still reside in the brokerage accounts of U.S. investors.”

Fidelity’s filing follows the recent announcement that BlackRock officially filed a spot Ether ETF, the iShares Ethereum Trust, with the SEC on November 16.

BlackRock’s filing comes nearly a week after it registered the iShares Ethereum Trust with the Delaware Division of Corporations and nearly six months after it filed its one-time Bitcoin ETF application.

On the other hand, on October 2, Grayscale Investments filed with the SEC to convert its Grayscale Ethereum Trust into an Ether ETF.

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