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Ripple effect

XRP ETFs poised to win the US approval race, report shows

Kaiko Research puts the odds of an XRP ETF being first to hit the US market higher than solana and dogecoin efforts.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

The race to launch altcoin ETFs is heating up, and XRP ETFs might be leading the pack in terms of being the first approved, according to a new Kaiko Research report

XRP, Ripple’s native token, is the fourth-largest crypto by market cap, at $123.5 billion. The token’s price is up over 300% in the past year, but is still a far cry from the all-time high of $3.84 it hit in January 2018.

Analysts at Kaiko Research argue that among all altcoin ETFs, XRP ETFs have the best chance of being approved before solana ETFs due to two drivers.

First: liquidity. The share of spot volume on US exchanges has “recently climbed to its highest level since before the SEC’s 2021 lawsuit prompted widespread delistings.”

Second, “the launch of a 2x XRP ETF last week positions XRP ahead of other assets when it comes to approval,” the analysts wrote.

Teucrium Investment Advisors launched that leveraged ETF mentioned in the report on April 8. Jake Hanley, Teucrium managing director, told Sherwood News that some questioned the timing of the launch, given current tariff-related volatility.

“Our instinct told us that there was demand for a 2x leveraged ETF, and we were right,” Hanley said.

XRP ETFs entered the race early, with filings from Grayscale, Bitwise, Canary, 21Shares, and WisdomTree. The SEC acknowledged a slew of them in February, meaning they’re a step ahead in the regulatory process. The deadline for approvals for most of these is in October.

Kaiko analysts noted, “May 22 is an important date to watch in light of the recent ETF approval of a 2x XRP ETF from Teucrium, as the SEC must respond to Grayscale’s XRP spot filing by then.”

XRP also holds the lion’s share of ETF filings, followed by solana, litecoin, dogecoin, and avalanche, the report found. 

Proshares, which just launched the first solana ETF in Canada, is taking advantage of the momentum around XRP, amending its January filing for three futures-based XRP ETFs on April 15 for a proposed April 30 launch, regulatory filings show.

Nic Puckrin, founder of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood that while many had been expecting solana ETFs to come first, it makes sense that XRP will be the first altcoin ETF approval, especially with Coinbase about to list XRP futures.

“Momentum is on Ripple’s side, with the SEC lawsuit now dropped and the recent acquisition of Hidden Road,” he said. “Plus, XRP has more interest in the US from retail investors than solana, and it’s in a strong position from the point of view of liquidity.”

Additionally, On April 16, Ripple and the SEC were officially granted a pause on appeals after a years-long legal battle, according to the filing posted by defense lawyer James K. Filan as the parties have “reached an agreement-in-principle” which signals this battle is ending.

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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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