Crypto issuers certainly think anything is possible now that Donald Trump is in office.
Exchange-traded fund issuer Rex Shares and crypto asset manager Osprey Funds filed on Tuesday for multiple crypto-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs), including a Trump ETF, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday.
The ETF will track the price of TRUMP, the memecoin launched by the President himself on Fridaya few days before his inauguration. The coin has gained nearly $17 billion in trading volume in the past 24 hours while falling nearly 25% over the same period.
First Lady Melania Trump also launched her own token called MELANIA, which currently trades for around $4. Both tokens are memecoins and therefore have no intrinsic value. Traders only bet on the increase or decrease in the price of the tokens.
An ETF that tracks its price is therefore worthless to buyers.
“It sounds to me like issuers are pushing the envelope with a new SEC oversight while trying a novel structure for providing exposure to digital assets in an ETF wrapper,” said James Seyffart, an analyst. of ETFs on Bloomberg Intelligence.
The issuers also filed documents to launch an ETF that tracks the price of Dogecoin (DOGE), another memecoin. In one of his first executive orderTrump established a “Department of Government Efficiency” by renaming it the US Digital Service. Although the entity is said to be tasked with streamlining several government agencies and departments, the website at press time only featured a photo of the dogecoin mascot.
The SEC under former Chairman Gary Gensler has been wary of approving ETFs that track cryptocurrencies. It took years for issuers to receive the green light to launch a spot bitcoin (BTC) ETF as well as a spot ethereum (ETH) ETF. It is unclear how quickly these latest applications, which also include ETFs tracking BONK (another memecoin), XRP (related to the company Ripple) and SOL (a layer 1 blockchain), could be approved.
Bloomberg Intelligence Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas called the Trump ETF application “surreal.”
