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Sol cycle

Grayscale launches solana ETF, a day after Bitwise’s record-breaking ETF launch

Bitwise’s BSOL recorded the highest day 1 trading volume of any launch this year, per Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Following the launch of the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF on Tuesday, Grayscale launched its solana Trust ETF this morning. The fund is trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker GSOL, and is the first of the firm’s staking funds to uplist (from a trust, launched in 2021) under the new generic listing standards the SEC approved last month.

More than 150 altcoin ETFs tracking 35 coins are soldiering through ways to list despite the government shutdown.

Craig Salm, Grayscale’s chief legal officer, told Sherwood News that, given the shutdown, Grayscale filed an amended S-1 for GSOL, removing the delaying amendment on the SEC’s issuance of guidance. This means the registration statement becomes automatically effective Tuesday afternoon, 20 days after that filing.

“The SEC may still request amendments or revisions once the government reopens and normal operations resume, but based on our engagement with the Commission on GSOL prior to the government shutdown, we’re confident in going to market,” he said.

As for the Bitwise solana ETF, it started off strong with high day 1 trading volume — “the MOST of any launch this year,” per Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas.

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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.

$389M

US Attorney David Metcalf announced Thursday the arrests of Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, alleged senior members of AudiA6, a cryptocurrency money-laundering service believed to be responsible for laundering over $389 million.

The arrests coincided with a coordinated international takedown of AudiA6 and its infrastructure, involving the search of three properties, the seizure of servers and domains connected to the organization, as well as freezing cryptocurrency assets, according to a Department of Justice press release.

Tkachuk and Ledenev were “charged by criminal complaint with one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering,” the DOJ said. If convicted, they face a maximum possible sentence of 20 years of incarceration.

Per the criminal complaint, AudiA6 offered services to conceal the origin of cryptocurrency linked to criminal activity, charging fees of up to 5% of the amount laundered.

The two defendants are in custody of Republic of Georgia authorities, and the US Attorney’s Office aims to seek their extradition to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

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