A new digital asset manager has filed to launch a spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF), joining a growing pile of hopefuls that also includes the established firms VanEck and 21Shares.
Canary Capital—which this month filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for XRP and Litecoin products—made the S-1 filing for the proposed Canary Solana ETF on Wednesday.
An ETF is a popular investment vehicle that trades on stock exchanges. If the SEC were to approve the Canary Solana ETF, investors would be able to buy shares that track the price of SOL, and gain exposure to the coin without having to purchase and store cryptocurrency.
SOL is the fifth-biggest digital asset. Its native blockchain is used for decentralized applications (dapps), decentralized finance (DeFi), meme coins, and more. It's seen as a key rival to Ethereum, the network behind ETH, offering cheaper and faster transactions.
The coin currently has a market cap of $82 billion, and has seen a 400% jump in value over the last year at a current price of about $175.
“Despite the hyper-competitive L1 and EVM landscape, Solana has emerged as a battle-tested front-runner for decentralized applications," Canary said in a statement. "Solana's robust DeFi ecosystem has led to strong sustained on-chain analytics as measured by transactions per day, active addresses, and new addresses, while maintaining a low fee environment for all consumers. Future growth in native on-chain stablecoin deployment will also likely further accelerate the commanding lead Solana maintains over its peers.”
Canary Capital is a Nashville, Tennessee-based firm that launched in September. It aims to give institutions crypto trading and management solutions.
In January, the SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs and they started trading the same month, while Ethereum ETFs were approved in May and began trading in July. But the regulator appeared reluctant to make such moves, following 10 years of attempts to gain approvals for Bitcoin funds, and the agency frequently hits crypto companies with lawsuits due to allegations that they sell unregistered securities.
The SEC has specifically alleged that it thinks SOL is an unregistered security. Analysts believe that Solana ETFs will eventually be approved in the United States following the recent Bitcoin and Ethereum fund nods, but the speed of such a move could depend on the outcome of next week's U.S. elections—and how much longer Gary Gensler remains Chairman of the SEC.
VanEck and 21Shares filed their respective applications to launch a spot Solana ETF back in June. Both firms also offer Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in the United States.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to add a comment from Canary Capital.