Chairman Gary Gensler said the licensing of United States’ Ether spot exchange-traded funds (ETF) would depend on how rapidly issuers can react to suggestions made by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Issuers in Charge of Ether ETF Approvals

Gensler’s remarks appear to place issuers in charge of approvals and show that the SEC will not prolong the process as some predicted.

On May 23, the SEC authorized eight 19b-4 files to offer spot Ether ETFs on different U.S. exchanges, though they cannot begin trading until they get the necessary S-1 registration statement approvals.

“These registrants are self-motivated to be responsive to the comments they get, but it’s really up to them how responsive they are,” said Gensler in a June 6 Reuters story.

Timing and Market Expectations

The remarks of Gensler just a day earlier on CNBC, when he indicated the following actions would “take some time,” provide fresh insight. This meant, some thought, that the commission would sign off on the S-1 forms slowly.

Although Eric Balchunas, a Bloomberg ETF analyst, has said the process might take weeks or months, his base case is for the first week of July.

Just days before the first decision deadline, the SEC still has to clarify why it seems to shift its attitude on spot ETFs.

Impact of Grayscale’s Legal Battle

Gensler did, however, imply to Reuters that Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF legal fight last year had an impact on the action.

Grayscale effectively argued in court that there should be no justification for rejecting spot Bitcoin ETFs since the SEC had approved them; this proved crucial in their acceptance.

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According to Gensler, Ethereum’s situation was comparable, and the SEC staff “looked at these [Ether] filings, looked at the various correlations… the correlations are rather similar to the correlations in the Bitcoin space.” Speaking to Reuters

Speculation on Political Influence

After forecasting its low probability for months and being taken flat-handed by the approval, Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart offered an alternative view on X. He says SEC Commissioner Jamie Lizárraga, who has past links to Democratic Party powerhouse Nancy Pelosi, had a role in the reversal on Ether ETFs.

“What I heard from other people was that this could have come from Lizárraga, who spent, I don’t know, a very long time working—he used to be Nancy Pelosi’s right-hand man,” said Seyffart in a Bits+Bips podcast with Unchained.

“And a lot of what I was hearing, even leading up to the ETH stuff, was Democrats in the Senate and the House really worried about how the crypto polling was showing up and how many people own it.”

Among many House Democrats, Pelosi backed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 22 in a “watershed moment” for cryptocurrencies.