Amid ongoing speculation surrounding the prospect of spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund approvals in the United States, Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said the Securities and Exchange Commission has “no good reason” to deny the ETF applications.
“The SEC has no good reason to deny the ETH ETP applications. And we hope they won’t try to invent one by questioning the long established regulatory status of ETH, which the SEC has repeatedly endorsed. That’s not how the law works. And Americans deserve better,” Grewal said. Historical records from the Wayback Machine indicate that the canary and its message were still visible on the Foundation's website as recently as January.
“This situation to me is a case of 'where there's smoke there may actually be fire,’” Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart said yesterday, responding to the news.Shortly after The Merge, Gensler stated that tokens in a PoS consensus system could be considered securities since investors rely on the efforts of others to make a profit.
Quintenz pointed out that the Ethereum futures ETF approval decision was made in October 2023 — well after Ethereum changed to PoS in September 2022. “If the SEC had any doubt about the regulatory treatment of ETH in Oct 2023, it wouldn’t have approved the ETF. Moreover, if ETH were a security, then the ETH futures ETF would be an illegal instrument. The SEC cannot approve an illegal instrument to trade over a national securities exchange,” he said.