VanEck kicks off solana ETF bid in the US

VanEck filed for a spot solana ETF with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday morning. 

The VanEck Solana Trust ETF still needs approval from the SEC. It would track the performance of solana’s price, according to the filing, and the ETF would be listed on the Cboe BZX exchange if approved.

“The Trust provides direct exposure to SOL and the Shares of the Trust are valued on a daily basis using prices drawn from a carefully evaluated group of trading platforms selected by MarketVector, which utilizes the CCData Centralized Exchange Benchmark data to construct the MarketVectorTM Solana Benchmark Rate,” the filing said. 

The firm said that there has “yet to be definitive regulatory guidance on whether and how registered broker-dealers can comply with these rules with regard to transacting in or holding spot SOL.”

Notably, VanEck is signaling that SOL should be treated as a commodity, even though the SEC named SOL an unregistered security in lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance last summer.

In a post on X, Matthew Sigel — VanEck’s head of digital assets research — said that SOL operates like bitcoin and ether and is “utilized to pay for transaction fees and computational services on the blockchain. Like ether on the Ethereum network, SOL can be traded on digital asset platforms or used in peer-to-peer transactions.”

“SOL’s decentralized nature, high utility, and economic feasibility align with the characteristics of other established digital commodities, reinforcing our belief that SOL may be a valuable commodity with use cases for investors, builders, and entrepreneurs looking for alternatives to the duopoly app stores,” he continued.

VanEck is the first US firm to file for an ETF linked to solana in the United States. Over in Canada, 3iQ made a bid last week to launch the first solana exchange-traded product (ETP) in North America. That product would list on the Toronto Stock Exchange, if approved.

That 3iQ proposal “kicks off the formal conversations” on solana with Canada’s Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), 3iQ Digital Assets president Chris Matta told Blockworks at the time.

Notably, the 3iQ offering would be a closed-end product, meaning it would offer a fixed number of shares. That differs from the ETPs many in the US are familiar with (such as the spot bitcoin ETFs) that create and redeem shares based on market demand.

The SEC is set to formally approve the registration statements of the proposed ether ETFs sometime this summer. However, SEC Chair Gary Gensler has previously voiced his skepticism about other crypto ETFs outside of ETH and bitcoin. 

US spot bitcoin ETFs launched in January. The products have collectively notched $14.4 billion of net inflows, with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) leading its competitors in terms of managed assets.

SOL is up 8% on the news.

Ben Strack contributed reporting.

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