Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) giving investors exposure to Ethereum (ETH) will be approved in May, British multinational bank Standard Chartered has projected.
In a Tuesday report, the bank said that it was likely that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would give spot ETH ETFs the green light by the final deadline of May 23.
And when the funds start trading, Standard Chartered expects the value of ETH will go as high as $4,000. ETH is currently priced at $2,372, according to CoinGecko, and hit an all-time high of $4,878 in November 2021.
A number of high-profile firms including Wall Street titan BlackRock have proposed their own spot ETH ETFs. Such ETFs—sought in earnest now that Bitcoin spot ETFs are available in the U.S.—would allow investors to gain exposure to the second-biggest digital asset without the need to buy and store it themselves.
Standard Chartered said that the investment vehicles were likely to get the approval stamp from the regulator because the SEC has not said ETH is a security. Meanwhile, the SEC has come down hard on crypto companies selling what it deems to be unregistered securities.
The Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has said ETH is a commodity—an asset that can be bought and sold, unlike a security—for years.
The SEC approved 10 Bitcoin ETFs on January 10 after a decade of denials. The BTC investment vehicles then started trading the next day and have since been a success.
Standard Chartered said last year that BTC would hit $100,000 per coin by the end of 2024. In today’s report, Geoffrey Kendrick, head of Standard Chartered Bank's forex and digital assets research, added that this price range “still looks achievable.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.