The ETF efforts tied to Grayscale Investments, Fidelity and Bitwise will be subjected to a three-week comment period, according to notices posted Tuesday by the agency "to solicit comments on the proposed rule change from interested persons."

Despite rising hopes after the agency's approval of bitcoin spot ETFs in January, industry analysts have become less optimistic that the regulator will follow suit with the products tracking Ethereum's (ETH). The commission had been pressured into abandoning its earlier opposition of the bitcoin applications after a key loss in a court dispute with Grayscale, and SEC officials had argued that their resulting approval of bitcoin ETFs doesn't apply to other tokens.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler had said in January that the bitcoin approval shouldn't "signal anything about the commission’s views as to the status of other crypto assets under the federal securities laws."

The arrival of the stable of (BTC) ETFs dramatically amplified investments in that token. A similar outcome could be expected for ETH if the agency ever arrives at similar approvals. However, the SEC has reportedly been probing whether ETH should be classified as a security, which would put it on a different legal footing than bitcoin.

May 23 is the deadline for the SEC to make final decisions on some of the ETF applications.

Regulations ether ETF Grayscale Fidelity Bitwise ETH Bitcoin ETF Securities and Exchange Commission

Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.