Galaxy Digital’s head of asset management believes spot Ether exchange-traded funds will be approved in “weeks” rather than days but agrees the decision will come sometime in July.
“Look, we’ve done this before. This is methodical, this is window dressing, the SEC is engaged,” said Steve Kurz in an interview with Bloomberg TV on July 2.
Galaxy Digital is one of eight asset managers with a proposed spot Ether ETF currently under review with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. It is collaborating with Invesco on the ETF.
“We’ve been doing this for months now, we did it with the Bitcoin ETF, the products are substantially similar — we know the plumbing, we know the process.”
Kurz’s estimate is largely in line with other ETF analyst estimates.
On June 28, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas pushed back his early July estimate for ETF approvals after the SEC took “extra time” to get back to applicants about their S-1 paperwork.
Galaxy Digital’s Steve Kurz speaking on Bloomberg TV. Source: Bloomberg
A July 2 Bloomberg report, citing two people familiar with the matter, added fuel to this theory, stating Ether ETF applicants have been given until July 8 to submit updated paperwork to address some minor issues.
This could be followed by an additional round of filings, they said.
Eight bidders, including BlackRock, Fidelity, 21Shares, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, VanEck, iShares, and Galaxy/Invesco, have already been given the green light to list their shares on their respective exchanges.
The issuers now need an approved S-1 filing for the Ethereum ETFs to go live for trading.
In a July 2 research report, K33 Research suggested Ether ETFs would be a “golden egg” for ETH’s price and could even outperform Bitcoin in the first weeks after it goes live.
[ZH: ETH has held its relative strength to BTC over the past month as the odds of approval of ETFs increase]
K33 analysts Vetle Lunde and David Zimmerman expect Ether “to stumble immediately following the launch of the ETFs” but noted that, much like what happened with Bitcoin, inflows to the funds would likely bolster ETH’s price.
