Crypto
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson (Patricia De Melo Moreira/Getty Images)

Grayscale piles on altcoin ETFs with cardano filing

Grayscale is on a crypto ETF roll.

Cardano is back in the crypto conversation as digital asset heavyweight Grayscale filed for a cardano ETF with the SEC yesterday. Last week, it filed a 19-b4 form with NYSE Arca to transform its doge trust into a doge ETF.

Cardano is the ninth-largest crypto by market cap, at $28 billion, according to CoinGecko. On Tuesday morning, hours after the Grayscale filing, the token was up 12.3%.

A Grayscale spokesperson, commenting on the cardano filing, said the firm was “appreciative of the opportunity to innovate while engaging constructively with regulators as they review crypto ETPs.”

“We remain optimistic about the potential of bringing digital assets further into the US regulatory perimeter in the ETP wrapper on behalf of Grayscale’s clients,” the spokesperson added. 

This cardano ETF filing is the “first one in US and ballpark 60th crypto ETF filed this year so far,” Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence senior ETF analyst, said in an X post.

The pace of altcoin and meme coin ETF filings is dizzying, especially considering that the SEC approved bitcoin spot ETFs just over a year ago. Firms, including Bitwise and Rex Osprey, are rushing to file such ETFs — whether they’re $TRUMP, doge, bonk, or XRP ETFs — taking advantage of the pro-crypto administration and wanting to get in early.

Approvals for these also seem to be fairly imminent. Balchunas recently posted his “altcoin ETF approval odds” on X.

“Litecoin leads w 90% chance, then Doge, followed by Solana and XRP,” he added.

Grayscale also filed to convert its XRP trust into an XRP ETF, as well as its solana and litecoin trusts into ETFs.

Todd Ruoff, CEO of Autonomys, noted that ADA hasnt really been “in the mainstream for some time,” adding that Grayscale’s application faces headwinds. “At least in the short term, with the lack of a regulated CME futures market and the SEC having previously labeled cardano as a security,” he said.

He added, however, that the move exemplifies the industry’s “relentless drive to pave the way for broader crypto-ETF adoption and integration into mainstream finance.”

Other experts also noted that ADA boasts an essential differentiator from, say, solana, namely regarding distribution and centralization.

Solana, “while advancing in speed, has faced criticism for centralization but is actively working towards broader decentralization,” Alan Orwick, cofounder of Quai Network, said. “Cardano boasts a more community-driven approach with over 3,000 validator nodes.”


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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