Solana CME futures tip impending US ETF approvals — Exec

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The upcoming motorboat of Solana (SOL) futures connected the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a US derivatives exchange, signals that the archetypal US SOL exchange-traded money (ETF) listings are coming soon, Chris Chung, laminitis of Solana-based swap level Titan, told Cointelegraph.

On March 17, CME is preparing to motorboat SOL futures contracts. They volition beryllium among the archetypal regulated Solana futures to deed the US marketplace aft Coinbase’s launched successful February.

The listing “paves the mode for the eventual support of SOL ETFs,” Chung told Cointelegraph.

Chung said helium expects the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to o.k. plus managers VanEck and Canary Capital’s projected spot Solana ETFs arsenic soon arsenic May.

The beingness of regulated Solana futures “signals to regulators that Solana is maturing arsenic an asset, making it easier for them to greenlight further fiscal products of akin hazard and type,” Chung said.

Futures contracts are standardized agreements to bargain oregon merchantability an underlying plus astatine a aboriginal date. They play a important supporting relation for spot cryptocurrency ETFs due to the fact that regulated futures markets supply a unchangeable benchmark for measuring a integer asset’s performance.

CME already lists futures contracts for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). US regulators approved ETFs for some of those cryptocurrencies past year.

Beyond memecoins

Additionally, Solana futures and ETFs volition assistance grow Solana’s maturation communicative beyond memecoins, which were cardinal to the blockchain network’s occurrence successful 2024, Chung said.

These products “will bring much serious, sticky superior and pave the mode for the improvement of different real-world usage cases, specified arsenic payments and remittances,” according to Chung.

Those usage cases are “[f]ar much boring than memecoins, perhaps, but a reliable root of semipermanent gross that volition buoy Solana’s terms successful the adjacent carnivore market.”

Memecoin trading, mostly tied to the fashionable Pump.fun platform, comprises astir 80% of the Solana blockchain network’s revenues, according to plus manager VanEck.

However, enactment connected the Solana web declined successful February aft a bid of memecoin-related scandals soured sentiment among retail traders.

Rivaling Ethereum

Still, cryptocurrency trading volumes connected Solana proceed to rival those of the full Ethereum ecosystem, including its layer-2 scaling chains, VanEck said connected March 6.

Chung said helium expects Solana ETFs to instrumentality disconnected among retail investors, partially due to the fact that of the challenges facing rival astute declaration level Ethereum.

Solana’s autochthonal SOL token has performed astir doubly arsenic good arsenic Ether since aboriginal 2024, according to TradingView.

Ethereum’s spot terms has struggled since March 2024, erstwhile the network’s Dencun upgrade chopped transaction fees by astir 95%.

“With the highly anemic terms enactment we’re seeing successful ETH, Solana is present the lone enactment for retail investors wanting to get vulnerability to crypto beyond Bitcoin, but not consenting to spell afloat degen,” Chung said.

Bloomberg Intelligence has acceptable the likelihood of the SEC approving spot Solana and Litecoin ETFs astatine 70%.

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