Surely cryptocurrency issuers seem to think that anything is possible now that Donald Trump is in office.
Exchange-traded fund issuer Rex Shares and crypto asset manager Osprey Funds on Tuesday filed for numerous cryptocurrency-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs), including a Trump ETF, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). on Tuesday.
The ETF would follow the price of TRUMP, the memecoin launched by the president himself on Friday, a few days before his inauguration. The coin racked up nearly $17 billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours and fell nearly 25% over the same period.
First Lady Melania Trump also launched her own token called MELANIA, which is currently trading at approximately $4. Both tokens are memecoins and therefore have no intrinsic value. Traders simply bet on the price of the tokens to go up or down.
Therefore, an ETF that tracks its price would offer no value to buyers.
“This seems to me like issuers are pushing the envelope with a new SEC administration while also trying a novel structure to provide exposure to digital assets in an ETF wrapper,” said James Seyffart, ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. .
The issuers also filed paperwork to launch an ETF that tracks the price of Dogecoin (DOGE), another memecoin. In one of his first executive orders, Trump established a “Department of Government Efficiency” by renaming the US Digital Service. While the entity is supposedly tasked with streamlining certain government agencies and departments, at the time of this publication Its website only featured an image of the dogecoin mascot.
The SEC, under former Chairman Gary Gensler, was careful in approving ETFs that track cryptocurrencies. It took years for issuers to receive the green light to launch a bitcoin (BTC) spot ETF, as well as an ethereum (ETH) spot ETF. It’s unclear how quickly these latest applications, which also include ETFs tracking BONK (another memecoin), XRP (associated with the Ripple company), and SOL (a layer 1 blockchain), could be approved.
Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, called Trump’s ETF request “surreal.”
