ETH Reaches 3-Week High After Valkyrie Includes Ether Futures In ETF

• Valkyrie recently received approval to offer Ethereum futures in its existing ETF.
• The approval pushed ETH’s price to a three-week high of $1,686.
• On-chain analytics showed that Ethereum was trending after the launch of Ethereum futures ETF.

United States-based financial services firm Valkyrie Funds LLC recently received the approval to offer Ethereum futures in its existing exchange-traded fund (ETF). Valkyrie’s latest move pushed ETH’s price to a three-week high of $1,686, adding more than $8 billion to the cryptocurrency’s market capitalization. The altcoin’s popularity soared as on-chain analytics from Santiment showed Ethereum trending online. 

Valkyrie began adding Ether futures to its existing Bitcoin futures ETF after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gave the green light for the same. The ETF will now be called the Valkyrie Bitcoin and Ether Strategy ETF. The financial services firm’s Chief Investment Officer Steven McClurg stated that the updated ETF would go live on October 2, 2023. 

Valkyrie has become the first firm to offer Ethereum futures in an ETF. This also marks the first time that futures based on Ether contracts would be made available to investors through an ETF. McClurg told Reuters that the SEC had approved applications submitted by rival asset managers VanEck and ProShares to offer Ethereum Futures ETF. 

The VanEck Ethereum Strategy ETF (EFUT) will invest in standardized, cash-settled ETH futures contracts traded on commodity exchanges, and has the SEC’s permission to launch on October 2 with Valkyrie’s hybrid BTC Ether ETF. “EFUT will be listed on CBOE and will be actively managed by Greg Krenzer, Head of Active Trading for VanEck,” VanEck stated in a press release.

Data from CoinMarketCap showed that ETH’s daily trading volume jumped 17% following the latest developments. Ether has gained more than 39% since the beginning of the year. At the time of writing, the leading altcoin was trading at $1,670, with a 24-hour trading volume of $6.8 billion. As per the on-chain analytics platform Coinglass, the total open interest on ETH futures went up by 1.5% over the past 24 hours.