Ether Tops $2.4K as Cathie Wood's Ark, 21Shares Amend Spot ETH ETF Filing

  • Ether price jumped 2% above $2,400 after Ark Invest/21Shares amended their spot Ethereum ETF paperwork.
  • The updates bring the ETF more "in line" with spot bitcoin ETFs that regulators approved last month, said Bloomberg Intelligence's Eric Balchunas.

Ethereum's native token ether {{ETH}} jumped above $2,400 Wednesday afternoon to a two-week high as asset managers Ark Invest and 21Shares amended their joint spot ETH exchange-traded fund (ETF) filing.

The updated S-1 paperwork filed Wednesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows that the ETF would feature a cash creation and redemption mechanism, which that regulatory agency favored for spot bitcoin ETFs that were approved in January.

"Looks like they updated to be only cash creations and some other things that bring it in line with the recently approved spot BTC ETF prospectus," Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, noted in an X post.

The document also added a section about possibly staking ether through "one or more trusted third party staking providers," opening the possibility for the fund to lock up some of its holdings and earn rewards.

ETH's price advanced nearly 2% within an hour from when the news appeared, breaking above $2,400 for the first time since January 22. The second-largest crypto by market cap was up 2.4% over the past 24 hours and outperformed the broader cryptocurrency market, with the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index that tracks the largest digital assets being up 1.2% and BTC gaining 0.4%.