With US President-elect Donald Trump just four days away from his inauguration and new leadership arriving at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), other cryptocurrencies could soon join bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) and receive your own spot exchange traded funds. (ETF).
Of these, litecoin (LTC) is likely to be the first to get the nod, according to Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart, two ETF analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence.
“Canary Funds just filed an amended S-1 for its litecoin ETF filing. There are no guarantees, but this could be indicative of the SEC’s involvement in the filing,” Seyffart posted on X.
“We had heard rumors that Litecoin S-1 had received feedback from the SEC,” Balchunas wrote, adding that the amended filing “bodes well for our prediction that Litecoin is very likely to be the next approved coin.”
Why litecoin? With a market capitalization of $8.8 billion, Litecoin is only the 11th largest cryptocurrency on the CoinDesk 20 (an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies excluding stablecoins, memecoins, and exchange coins) and the 24th largest coin overall.
But litecoin is a fork of bitcoin, meaning its protocol follows the same basic rules as Bitcoin; uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, for example. Importantly, the SEC has never called litecoin a security, unlike larger cryptocurrencies like solana (SOL) and ripple (XRP).
“We expect a wave of cryptocurrency ETFs next year, although not all at once,” Balchunas wrote in December. “First to go will probably be the combined bitcoin and ether ETFs, then probably litecoin (because it’s a fork of bitcoin = commodity), then HBAR (because it’s not labeled as a security) and then XRP/Solana (which have been labeled as values in pending lawsuits). “
However, the SEC under Paul Atkins is likely to approach the crypto industry in a different way than it did under Gary Gensler, which Balchunas noted was a “huge variable.” Importantly, Canary Funds, which filed its S-1 filing for a litecoin ETF in October, has yet to file its 19b-4, meaning there is currently no deadline for the SEC to approve or reject the product. .
