21Shares joins race to launch XRP ETF with SEC filing

Cryptocurrency exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuer 21Shares wants to give US investors exposure to XRP.

The Swiss company on Friday filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch the XRP ETF.

If approved, the 21Shares Core XRP Trust will track the seventh largest digital coin by market value, in shares trading throughout the day.

“We are committed to expanding US investors into the cryptocurrency asset class, and we look forward to driving innovation in the US,” the company said in a statement.

XRP is a digital coin created by the founders of fintech company Ripple. 21 Shares issues ETFs, and operates Bitcoin and Ethereum funds in the US following approvals from the SEC earlier this year.

Other asset managers—including crypto asset manager Bitwise—hope to release an ETF that tracks the price of XRP. Asset manager Grayscale recently launched the XRP Trust, and previously converted similar Bitcoin and Ethereum closed-end funds into real-time ETFs after the SEC approved these products for trading.

However, the SEC is currently embroiled in a years-long lawsuit with Ripple, slapping the company with a $1.3 billion lawsuit that sells unregistered securities in the form of XRP.

Ripple won a partial court victory against the regulator last year when it ruled that programmatic sales of XRP to retail investors did not qualify as securities. The judge ruled that an estimated $728 million in institutional sales were unregistered securities sales, but the news was still seen as a victory for the crypto industry.

The SEC has since demanded a $2 billion fine from Ripple, but a New York court ordered the company to pay only a $125 million fine. The SEC has since appealed, but Ripple appears confident it will win again, with the company's chief legal officer, Stuart Alderotti, recently telling Decrypt that the move will “backfire” and take advantage of the crypto industry in the process.

Despite the ongoing legal dispute, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in an interview last week that he believes the SEC's approval of the XRP ETF is “inevitable” as the regulator moves forward into Bitcoin and Ethereum products.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.