Today, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) has filed 19b-4 forms for Bitwise Investment, WisdomTree, 21Shares, and Canary Funds, making their proposals to list and trade XRP ETFs one step closer to approval.
The filings were made directly to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which now has 240 days to either approve or reject them. The 19b-4 filings officially ask the SEC to approve rule changes that allow these XRP ETFs to go live on the Cboe BZX Exchange. Whether that happens or not is anyone’s guess.
But the SEC recently acknowledged similar filings for Litecoin ETFs from both Canary Funds and Grayscale, which gives XRP bulls something to watch, and it did undergo a major pro-crypto overhaul after president Donald Trump went back to the Oval.
Every single XRP ETF application leans hard on a July 2023 SEC ruling on Ripple, which said that XRP isn’t a security on its own. But Ripple’s institutional sales? Yeah, Judge Torres said those still crossed the line into securities violations.
Now XRP’s stuck in a weird spot compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum. It doesn’t have a futures market on the CME, which the SEC usually checks off its list before giving ETF approvals, so the applicants are pushing alternatives like on-chain analytics, price tracking, and market structure analysis as tools to keep fraud and manipulation in check.
In their respective filings, WisdomTree talked about global liquidity and how arbitrage keeps prices tight, Bitwise pointed to Bitcoin and Ethereum’s success as proof XRP’s price discovery process is solid, 21Shares made its case with XRP’s pricing dynamics and steady trading volumes, and Canary’s was all about XRP’s use in payments and remittances to show real-world utility.
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