With US President-elect Donald Trump just four days away from inauguration and new leadership coming to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), additional cryptocurrencies are about to join bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH ) and receive their own spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Of these, litecoin (LTC) is likely to be the first to receive the nod, according to Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart, two ETF analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence.
“Canary Funds just filed an amended S-1 for their litecoin ETF filing. There are no guarantees – but this could indicate SEC engagement in the filing,” Seyffart posted in X.
“We heard chatter that litecoin S-1 got comments from the SEC,” Balchunas wrotewhich added that the revised filing “bodes well for our prediction that litecoin is likely to be the next coin to be approved.”
Why litecoin? With a market capitalization of $8.8 billion, litecoin is the 11th largest cryptocurrency in the CoinDesk 20 (an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies excluding stablecoins, memecoins and exchange coins) and 24th largest coin overall.
But litecoin is a bitcoin fork, meaning its protocol follows the same basic rules as Bitcoin; it uses a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, for example. Importantly, the SEC has never called litecoin a security, contrary to larger cryptocurrencies like solana (SOL) and ripple (XRP).
“We expect a wave of cryptocurrency ETFs next year, though not all at once,” Balchunas wrote in December. “First likely the bitcoin and ether combo ETF, then likely litecoin (since it’s a fork of bitcoin = commodity), then HBAR (since unlabeled security) and then XRP/Solana (labeled which are securities in pending lawsuits).
But the SEC under Paul Atkins is likely to approach the crypto industry differently than under Gary Gensler, which Balchunas noted is a “huge variable.” Importantly, Canary Funds — which submitted its S-1 filing for a litecoin ETF in October — has yet to file its 19b-4, meaning there is currently no deadline for the SEC to approve or reject the product.
