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Franklin Templeton Investments ground sign at its office in San Mateo, California, USA
Franklin Templeton Investments (Getty Images)
Sol Cycle

Franklin Templeton enters the solana ETF race

The asset manager continues its growth into the crypto space.

Franklin Templeton is the latest firm joining the enthusiastic crew aiming for altcoin ETFs. On February 10, the firm registered a solana trust in Delaware, indicating that it could soon follow with an ETF filing with the SEC.

The firm, with $1.5 trillion in assets under management including $594 million worth of tokenized Treasuries, joins the likes of Bitwise, Grayscale, Rex Osprey, VanEck, 21Shares, and Canary Capital in the race for a solana ETF.

Solana is the sixth-largest crypto by market cap, at $95.8 billion, according to CoinGecko, and is the blockchain behind many meme coins, such as trump.  

“The solana ecosystem has grown in leaps and bounds over the past year, and the fees generated by the network have drawn a lot of attention,” Sid Powell, CEO and cofounder of Maple, said.

Further underscoring the mind-boggling race for solana ETFs, the SEC acknowledged four of them on February 11 — VanEck, Canary, 21Shares, and Bitwise — in what many experts view as an accelerated approval process.  

Last week, the SEC also opened comments on the Grayscale solana ETF. But solana ETFs face some potential challenges, one of them being the classification of the underlying asset.

“Concerns [for the SEC] include solana’s classification as a potential security and the lack of regulated futures markets for SOL, which has historically been a prerequisite for ETF approvals,” Alan Orwick, cofounder of Quai Network, said.

Whether these ETFs will be the first altcoin ETFs to be approved, only the regulatory gods know. 

Chris Chung, founder of solana swap platform Titan, noted that solana and Ripple’s XRP are currently in a tug-of-war regarding which token gets the first approved ETF. 

“While Ripple has perhaps a better story for retail investors who may have bought it in the previous bull cycle, solana has had a major endorsement from the launch of Trump’s meme coin,” he said. “So the chips could still fall either way.”

Chung added that overall, a solana ETF approval is very likely in 2025 and will be “a catalyst to position the asset as the chain for institutional inflows, especially due to the amount of trading activity happening.”


Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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