🏦 The Solana ETF race heats up

The race to launch the first U.S. Solana ETF is accelerating and it’s no longer a fringe idea.

In the past week, heavyweights including Canary Capital, Franklin Templeton, VanEck, Fidelity, Grayscale, CoinShares, and Bitwise all filed amended S-1s with the SEC. These aren’t fresh applications. They’re updates, showing issuers are in ongoing talks with regulators and signaling progress behind the scenes.

Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart put it bluntly: the sheer volume of revised filings shows the SEC is engaging with multiple firms at once.

🔍 What’s new in the filings

The tweaks aren’t cosmetic. Issuers are getting specific on how these ETFs would actually work:

• Staking: Grayscale’s plan includes a 2.5% fee paid in SOL and details on auto-compounding staking rewards. Canary’s filing designates Marinade Select as its exclusive staking partner, the first U.S. ETF proposal with a clear, institutional staking framework.

• Custody: Assets split between hot and cold wallets, with custodians holding all private keys. Investors never touch the tokens. Daily disclosures of NAV, holdings, and premiums/discounts would improve transparency.

• Risks: Expanded sections now cover validator failure, network downtime, slashing, forks, and airdrops, the messy realities of running on-chain exposure inside a regulated wrapper.

Why this matters

The filings underscore how far Solana has come. Once written off as a retail meme chain, it’s now being positioned as an institutional-grade asset.

• TVL and usage are back near highs.

• Custody solutions are more robust.

• Regulators are being courted with risk disclosures and compliance language, not combative posturing.

Approval would put Solana alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as mainstream ETF assets, and staking could make it even more attractive than its predecessors.

👉 Takeaway: The SEC hasn’t given the green light yet, but the flood of amended filings shows the race is real. For asset managers, the strategy is clear: cooperate, clarify, and conform. For investors, the message is louder: Solana isn’t just retail’s playground anymore, Wall Street wants in.

1. WLFI unlock turns into a derivatives frenzy

• WLFI, the Trump-linked token, is unlocking its first tranche today.

• Derivatives volume exploded +530% to $4.6B, with open interest up 60% to $941M.

• OKX, Binance, and Bitget are leading venues, with Binance alone handling $2.2B in trades.

👉 Unlocks test token economics. Early investors (entry at $0.015–$0.05) could see 20x gains if prices hold, but volatility is guaranteed. WLFI’s debut is also wrapped in politics: the Trump family holds 22.5B tokens, worth ~$26M at today’s price.

2. Metaplanet’s flywheel stalls, stock halves

• Japan’s Metaplanet has shed 54% of its value in 3 months, after soaring 400% earlier this year.

• The collapse broke its “flywheel” financing model with Evo Fund. No rising stock = no incentive to fund more BTC buys.

• The firm now plans to raise $3.8B via preferred shares, a defensive move to keep buying Bitcoin.

👉 At its peak, Metaplanet traded at 8x its BTC stash. Today? Barely 2x. That shrinking premium mirrors the cracks in Michael Saylor’s playbook. And politics adds fuel, Eric Trump is flying in for the shareholder vote in Tokyo.C

• Michael Saylor’s Strategy waits for key decision after qualifying for S&P 500 listing

• Ripple unveils interactive demo for its payments platform

• Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro to chair $200M Dogecoin treasury firm

• BTC markets absorbed selling from high-profile whales, pressuring the price down to $107K

• Trump warns US would be destroyed without tariff revenue

• America’s elite funnel billions into private credit

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