Altcoin ETFs: solana, XRP and the rest

For most of this asset class's history, getting a crypto fund listed in the United States meant a bespoke rule change filing and the better part of a year. That ended on 18 September 2025, and the consequence is a category that now expands whenever a sponsor decides it is worth the paperwork.

Why these exist now

The mechanism matters more than any individual launch, so it is worth getting right.

Before September 2025, listing a new commodity-based trust product required the exchange to file a 19b-4 rule change with the SEC and wait through a statutory review period that routinely ran to nine months, with the outcome genuinely uncertain. That is why spot bitcoin took a decade and ended up being resolved in court.

The SEC then adopted generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares. Exchanges such as Nasdaq and NYSE Arca can now list a qualifying product under a standing rule rather than negotiating each one. Reported approval timelines fell to roughly 75 days, and the SEC asked issuers with pending 19b-4 filings for solana, XRP, dogecoin, cardano and litecoin to withdraw them — not as a rejection, but because they had become unnecessary.

Solana funds

Solana was the first mover after the rule change, with two products debuting in late October 2025 and more following.

The Bitwise product is the interesting one structurally, because it stakes. Solana is a proof-of-stake network and reported staking payouts on these products have been in the region of 6–7% annually — considerably more material to the total proposition than ether's. A solana fund that does not stake is leaving a much larger share on the table than a non-staking ether fund is.

Note the fee spread: 0.20% net against 2.50%. That is a twelve-fold difference for exposure to the same coin, and it follows the same pattern as bitcoin and ether — the converted trust at the expensive end, the fund competing for new flows at the cheap end.

XRP funds

XRP products launched in November 2025 and the category reached seven active funds.

A category with seven competing products and total cumulative flows in the low billions is a very different proposition from the bitcoin market, where a single fund holds roughly $47bn. Spread across seven, the average XRP fund is small — which brings us to the part of this page that matters most.

What gets approved next

We are not going to give you a list of predicted approvals with dates, because forecasting regulatory outcomes is not research and the sites that do it are usually recycling prediction-market odds as though they were analysis.

What is worth knowing is the shape of the pipeline. Dogecoin, cardano and litecoin were all part of the same filing wave whose 19b-4s the SEC asked issuers to withdraw after the generic standards came in. Sponsors have filed for a long tail of assets beyond those. The binding constraint is now whether a sponsor thinks a product will attract enough assets to be worth running — and given that one bitcoin fund has already been liquidated, that is not a trivial bar.

The liquidity problem

This is the section we would most want an investor considering one of these to read.

A fund's size is not a quality signal, but it is a very direct signal about what it will cost you to deal and how likely the product is to survive. The arithmetic runs in a straight line: fewer assets means fewer authorised participants finding the arbitrage worth doing, which means a wider bid-offer spread, which means you pay more to get in and receive less to get out.

That spread is invisible in every fee comparison table ever published, because it is not a published number. On a large bitcoin fund it is a couple of basis points and irrelevant. On a small single-asset altcoin fund it can be an order of magnitude wider, and it widens further in exactly the conditions where you are most likely to want to sell.

Staking in altcoin funds

Most of the assets in this category are proof-of-stake, which makes the staking decision more consequential here than it is for ether and far more consequential than for bitcoin, where it does not arise.

Reported staking payouts on solana products have been in the 6–7% range. A fund that holds solana without staking it is therefore giving up something substantial, and a fund that does stake is taking on validator operations, slashing exposure and unbonding friction on a network with different characteristics from Ethereum's.

The question to ask of any altcoin fund is not whether it stakes but who operates the validators, what happens if they are slashed, and what share of the payout reaches you. All three are in the prospectus. None of them are in the marketing.

The UK position

None of the US funds on this page can be bought by a UK retail investor — the FCA restriction on crypto ETFs applies regardless of which coin a fund holds.

The FCA's October 2025 permission for cryptoasset ETNs is not written coin-by-coin, so in principle an altcoin note admitted to a UK recognised investment exchange would be available. In practice the London market has concentrated almost entirely on bitcoin and ether, because that is where the issuers saw demand. If you want exposure to solana, XRP or anything further down the list through a listed product in the UK, the honest answer is that availability is patchy and you should check your broker's instrument list rather than assume.

The multi-asset index products are the partial exception, since they bundle several coins into one line. See crypto index and basket funds.

Our view

The generic listing standards were a sensible piece of regulatory plumbing, and the effect has been to move the decision about which crypto products exist from a regulator to a market. That is probably the right place for it.

What it has also produced is a lot of small funds. Seven XRP products sharing a low-single-billions pool of flows is not a healthy market structure; it is a race in which most participants lose. Our expectation — and it is an expectation rather than a forecast — is consolidation, with the funds that do not reach scale being quietly closed.

For an investor, the practical conclusion is unglamorous: in this corner of the market, fund scale deserves more weight than fee. Being in the survivor matters more than saving fifteen basis points. Cryptoassets in this part of the market are high risk, the underlying coins are more volatile than bitcoin, and past performance is not a reliable indicator of future events.