Despite recent approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on several spots Crypto Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) applications, agents are unlikely to make a decision to approve these products until leadership resolves.
“We’re excited to announce that James Seifert, ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence,” said: “It was our assumption that anything that Atkins could push up to officially be in the SEC would be pushed back.”
Those familiar with the issue told Koindsk that they agreed with the view. “I think this administration shows its ability to break precedents, so I think it’s within the realm of the possibility of seeing early approval. I’d be surprised, but you’ll never know,” the person said.
President Donald Trump has appointed the current CEO to lead the agency, former SEC commissioner of Patmac Global Partner Paul Atkins. Former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler resigned from his position in January ahead of Trump’s appointment. However, no hearing is scheduled yet to be scheduled for Atkins’ confirmation.
According to Seyffart, it delayed decisions on several spot Crypto ETFs on Tuesday, including XRP, Solana (Sol), Dogecoin (Doge) and Litecoin (LTC).
Despite the fact that both assets had established regulated futures markets, it took the issuers years to launch Spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) ETFs, which will launch SEC’s Greenlight. This is not a legal requirement for launching ETFs based on assets, but it was an important standard for SEC when launching ETFs related to BTC and ETH.
None of the current unresolved ETF applications meet that criteria. Nevertheless, Seyffart and his colleagues are seeing some Altcoin ETF approval odds at over 65% by the end of the year. Some of the applications scheduled for May and June decisions are likely to see approvals, but it all depends on checking for new chairs.
In past reviews of Spot Bitcoin and Ether ETF applications, the SEC has taken advantage of a procedural delay that is normally permitted to be used to extend deadlines to nearly 240 days.
“In theory, you should have a chair by then, but you don’t necessarily have to be guaranteed that these things will be approved anytime soon. It’s certainly possible than the March and April deadlines for these different spot crypto assets,” says Seyffart.