Bitwise has filed an S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an exchange-traded fund tied to the price of Ripple's XRP.
The filing comes after the asset manager registered a trust in Delaware on Tuesday, giving the first hint of his intentions.
Bitwise has taken a major step toward launching an exchange-traded fund tied to XRP (XRP), the token of Ripple and one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world.
On Wednesday, the asset manager filed Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a requirement for companies looking to issue new securities and list their shares on a public stock exchange.
“Today we filed an S-1 for the Bitwise XRP ETP!” Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley wrote in a post on X. “For over a decade, XRP has been a stable crypto that many investors want access to.”
The move comes a day after Bitwise registered a trust called the “XRP ETF” in Delaware; many companies register their entities in the state, and crypto ETF issuers have repeatedly announced their plans through Delaware filings.
XRP is the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $33 billion, according to CoinDesk. Its larger rivals, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum’s ether (ETH), have been available to investors as ETFs, an extremely popular type of product in traditional finance, since earlier this year.
While filing an S-1 is the first step toward creating a fund, the document is essentially meaningless unless it is followed by another filing, called a 19b-4, which is required to signal a necessary rule change to a stock exchange seeking to list the investment.
Unlike Regulation 19b-4, which binds the SEC's decision to approve or deny an application to strict deadlines, the regulator has no such obligation to respond to the S-1, meaning it could take years for Bitwise to get approval.
For example, VanEck filed an S-1 to launch an ether ETF in 2021, but the fund won't hit the market until July 2024, more than three years from now.
However, Bitwise's efforts to create a fund tracking XRP are "quite remarkable," industry expert Nate Geraci, president of ETF Store, told ONE in response to Tuesday's filing.
"Bitwise is a very solid crypto fund company that is just throwing things at the wall," he added.
