Several issuers have received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch exchange-traded funds investing directly in ether, the first such products in the market.
It is the final procedure in a two-step process, after the SEC in May, following a sudden change in stance, approved the so-called 19b-4 filings from several stock exchanges requesting rule changes that would enable them to list ether ETFs.
The ether ETFs will start trading on Tuesday, months after spot bitcoin ETFs were launched in January.
The approval of ether ETFs has mostly been priced in by the market, according to Michael Anderson, co-founder at crypto venture-capital firm Framework Ventures. Ether (ETHUSD) was trading at around $3,484 Monday evening, down 0.7%, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
After the ETFs are launched, their flows could have a significant impact on ether price, Anderson added.
The consensus is that ether ETFs will see much less inflow than their bitcoin counterparts. While spot bitcoin ETFs saw $13.8 billion of inflows in the first 100 days of trading, ether ETFs are likely to see roughly $4.8 billion to $6.4 billion of inflows during the same period, according to analysts at crypto-trading firm Wintermute.
It could be partly attributable to ether's smaller market capitalization, which sat at around $417 billion as of Monday, roughly one-third of the $1.3 trillion market cap of bitcoin (BTCUSD), according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Meanwhile, when some wealth managers and advisers allocated capital into the crypto space when bitcoin ETFs were launched in January, "they weren't assuming that they were going to get an ethereum ETF so quickly after it," according to Tim Rice, chief executive at crypto data-provider Coin Metrics.
Such investors may already have reached the limit of what they would like to allocate to crypto, Rice said in a phone interview. "I think that's going to temper some of the initial enthusiasm for ether ETF," Rice said.
It's also unlikely for these investors to sell some bitcoin ETFs and buy ether ETFs instead, as they would want to avoid the short-term capital-gains tax, which is based on profits from the sale of an asset held for one year or less, Rice noted.
Still, bitcoin and ether provide "very different use cases," said Eliézer Ndinga, head of strategy and business development at 21Shares. Based on his observation of the demand facing crypto exchange-traded products, or ETPs, the firm issued in Europe, investors tend to buy both bitcoin and ether products, Ndinga said in a call. Ether ETPs trade on stock exchanges that track the price of ether, while ETFs are a subset of ETPs.
Another catch of the ether ETFs is that the funds will not stake the ether they invest in, which has been a concession by issuers due to the regulatory uncertainty around staking. Staking is a process where investors lock up their crypto to secure the ethereum blockchain and earn rewards. Staking ether currently generates a return of 3.2%, according to the Ethereum Foundation, which supports the blockchain.
"Without staking, ether ETFs lose a significant source of potential returns, making them less attractive to yield-seeking investors," analysts at Wintermute wrote in a Monday note.
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