Bitcoins
Bitcoins At the moment, Canary Capital appears best-positioned to be the initial issuer of the new vehicle.
Jan 16, 2025, 9:33 p.m. UTC
While a litecoin (LTC) exchange-traded fund is still only theoretical, investor demand for the product could soar as high as $580 million if Wall Street adopts it at the same rate it did LTC’s better-known cousin bitcoin.
That calculation is based on the roughly 6% of bitcoin’s total supply now locked up in a variety of ETFs. Similar performance by a LTC product would yield more than $500 million of inflows for the token, which has a similar Proof of Work consensus mechanism to that of BTC.
These possibilities came into focus Thursday as market participants began sizing up the likelihood that LTC might become the third crypto asset to get its own ETF in the U.S., after BTC and ETH.
Canary Capital, a new digital asset-focused investment firm founded by former Valkyrie Funds co-founder Steven McClurg, is best positioned to issue such a product.
It got the ball rolling on a litecoin ETF in October. On Thursday, Nasdaq stock exchange filed a 19b-4 document with the Securities and Exchange Commission, officially putting the regulator on the clock to make a decision.
Bloomberg’s Balchunas expects LTC to garner SEC approval given industry chatter he said he’s been hearing. Litecoin’s similar tech specs to bitcoin may also prove a factor, assuming their reliance on proof of work consensus mechanism spell better likelihood of being considered a commodity.
The question is whether there is enough investor demand to make a litecoin fund a success or not.
“Even if demand is comparatively low, it could still see some demand,” said James Seyffart, ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Just because the success won’t be as crazy as the bitcoin or even the ethereum ETFs doesn’t mean that it can’t be successful. The market and investors will make that determination.”
The bitcoin ETFs set unprecedented records in their first year of trading, with the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Fund (IBIT) becoming the most successful launch in the history of U.S. ETF launches.
“The key question here remains the uncertainty of investor demand for additional products and whether new crypto ETP launches will matter,” JPM analyst Kenneth B. Worthington wrote in a note on Monday.
Worthington believes that tokens beyond Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana oftentimes lack depth as they “may capture incremental attention for a limited time.”
About 6% of bitcoin total market capitalization, which stands at a whopping $1.97 trillion, is locked up in the ETFs, according to a report by JPMorgan earlier this week. In comparison, the ethereum (ETH) ETFs comprise about 3% of ether’s $401 billion market cap.
He used this so-called “adoption rate” to determine how much inflows the proposed XRP (XRP) and Solana (SOL) ETFs could attract which Worthington concluded could add up to a combined AUM of up to $14 billion.
When applying this calculation to Litecoin, which stands at a $9.6 billion market cap, Canary Capital’s fund could attract anywhere between $290 to $580 million in the first year of trading, depending on how well investors will adopt the fund.
While $290 million seems disappointing compared to the $108 billion that the spot bitcoin ETFs have gathered or the $12 billion that the ether ETFs currently hold, it is a larger amount than most ETFs in the U.S. handle.
According to Seyffart, only about 1,330 out of roughly 4,000 ETFs in the U.S. have an AUM greater than $300 million.
Helene Braun
Helene is a New York-based news reporter at CoinDesk, covering news about Wall Street, the rise of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and updates on crypto exchanges. She is also the co-host of CoinDesk’s Markets Daily show on Spotify and Youtube. Helene is a recent graduate of New York University’s business and economic reporting program and has appeared on CBS News, YahooFinance and Nasdaq TradeTalks. She holds BTC and ETH.
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