CoinShares, FTX Team Up To Launch Solana ETP

Crypto exchange FTX and Europe’s largest ETP issuer are joining forces and will kick off the alliance with a Solana offering. 

The partnership’s first initiative is the launch of the CoinShares FTX Physical Staked Solana ETP (exchange-traded product), which will be listed on Germany’s main market Xetra. The product leverages Galata, CoinShares’ technology platform, as well as FTX’s institutional offerings.

Solana’s ability to timestamp transactions, as well as its speed and scalability features, makes it one of the most advanced layer-1 blockchains, CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti said. 

“It is often referred to as the chain built by financial services-minded people for financial services applications,” he told Blockworks in an email. “Hence, it makes it very appealing for [traditional finance] allocators who can project themselves into several use cases.”

CoinShares made the deliberate choice to launch such an ETP without sacrificing “the elegance of the underlying technologies,” the CEO added. The product is designed to share staking rewards of 3% per year.

“It was out of the question to do it without being able to transfer a meaningful part of staking rewards to our clients,” Mognetti said. “We now have a way to handle the legal aspect of that whilst ensuring daily liquidity on staking processes with asymmetric unbonding periods.”

On Solana, it takes 3 epochs — or approximately 10 days — for stake to activate or deactivate, according to the blockchain’s documentation. Asymmetric unbonding means that enough staked assets should be deactivated at intervals to allow the fund to maintain sufficient liquidity for redemptions.

The announcement follows FTX’s launch of FTX Access earlier this month to initially offer advisory services, index products, trade execution, analytical tools and capital introductions for institutional investors. 

FTX noted at the time that it would also look to provide custody, derivatives, structured products and other asset management offerings.

Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder and CEO, said in a statement that CoinShares was “the obvious choice to collaborate with for institutional offerings” and that he looks forward to collaborating with the firm on future products. 

Mognetti declined to comment on potential future products and initiatives it could launch with FTX. 

Partnerships are no rarity for CoinShares. The company, which manages $3.8 million in assets, boosted its equity stake in FlowBank earlier this month. The Swiss bank will offer exposure to digital assets, as well as features such as holding, staking and lending, through CoinShares’ Galata.    

CoinShares also teamed up with Scalable Capital last year as the wealth manager added a Scalable Crypto offering — backed by CoinShares’ physically backed ETPs — to its mobile app. 

The Solana ETP marks the fourth launched by CoinShares this year, all of which have involved staking rewards. The investment firm in January launched Polkadot and Tezos products that are designed to share staking rewards of 5% and 3%, respectively, per year.

It then brought its Physical Staked Cardano ETP to the German market earlier this month.

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