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While analysts currently believe that Solana’s exchange-traded fund (ETF) approvals are unlikely, VanEck’s head of digital assets suggests there could be a way to change that.
While the general consensus is that Solana won’t get an ETF approved anytime soon, one executive said a crypto fraud case that concluded in 2018 could provide clues about how the process could be reversed.
VanEck Exec Speaks About Solana ETF
Matthew Sigel, VanEck’s head of digital assets research, said the firm continues to view Solana (SOL) as a commodity like Bitcoin and Ether, a classification that Solana needs to have in the U.S. to get its own crypto ETF.
“This belief is informed by evolving legal perspectives that courts and regulators have begun to recognize certain crypto assets as securities in primary markets, but are behaving more like commodities in secondary markets,” Sigel said on the X platform on August 20.
Sigel referred to a now-dismissed six-year lawsuit filed in 2018 against a fraudulent crypto payments company called My Big Coin.
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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit in 2018 accusing the company’s founders of selling the “My Big Coin” token to customers and lying about its use and value, alleging violations of the Commodity Exchange Act.
The defendants argued in an effort to have the case dismissed because the token was not a commodity because there were no futures contracts referencing it. However, the judge rejected that argument, saying My Big Coin was a “virtual currency” like Bitcoin, drawing an analogy with natural gas.
That was enough for the CFTC to argue that MBC was a commodity, allowing the case to proceed. The founder was convicted by a federal jury in 2022 and sentenced to 100 months in prison; he was also ordered to pay $7.6 million to the victims of the fraud. “This same logic could apply to digital assets like Solana and shape the future of ETF regulation,” Sigel added. But in the short term, other ETF commentators are less optimistic.
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