##  [# The Crypto Crystal Ball: What’s Next for ETFs](/sections/conferences/crypto-crystal-ball-whats-next-etfs) 

 

# The Crypto Crystal Ball: What’s Next for ETFs

 

 

Bloomberg's James Seyffart predicts the massive flood of crypto ETFs coming, predicting 100+ new digital asset ETFs will launch in the next six months – though most won't survive the year. From the long-tail curve of Solana and XRP ETFs to why broad crypto index products are the long-term winning strategy (akin to the 90s tech boom), Seyffart weighs in on it all. And find out why advisors and investors flock to ETFs for crypto exposures over direct investing.



 

 

 

 

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[By ETF.com Staff](/contributors/etfcom-staff)

 Nov 21, 2025

 Edited by: ETF.com Staff

 

 

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James Seyffart, CFA, CAIA, Senior Research Analyst of Bloomberg Intelligence, sheds light on the state of crypto ETFs and what's on the near horizon for launches. Recorded in October at the Astoria Macro Summit with ETF.com's Dave Nadig, the discussion touches on the expected role of crypto index ETFs in portfolios, tokenization, what investors are missing in crypto, and more. Below is the full transcript of the conversation.

**Transcript**

**Seyffart:** What’s going to happen is we’re going to get 100 plus digital assets ETFs that come to market in the next six months. You go 12 months after that I wouldn’t be surprised a lot of them are going to be gone.

## What Crypto Assets are Next for ETFs

**Nadig:** So look, you're clearly the foremost expert on the intersection between crypto and ETFs. We've obviously got the first round of these things out, huge up-take. Now we're sort of down to the weeds a little bit. We're going to get the filings for stake ETFs, we're going below ethereum and bitcoin. What's your prediction for how that tail of the curve is going to grow? Are we going to see a lot of adoption there? Are we going to see a lot more product or is there a natural petering out?

**Seyffart:** Yeah. Honestly, I wish I knew the answer. I obviously have my views on what I think is going to happen. I think the long tail of assets, they're not going to be able to have five different ETFs. You know this, right? Like you're not going to have the 13th largest crypto asset have nine different ETFs tracking it. Probably not. Then again, the single stock era has kind of made me think that maybe you can get a 2x and inverse inverse, covered call, super yield. Who knows what's going to happen?

That's happening. There's buffer products, there's defined outcome products on ethereum and bitcoin and probably going to have on these crypto index products. So I think we see demand for Solana and XRP off the bat. We already see products that are – you have the Rex Share the the Rex Osprey products, which are pseudo spot products, they've done pretty damn well for high fees and not the most cleanest structure.

**Nadig:** Those are the ones that sort of go through the Caymans and that whole thing.

**Seyffart:** Exactly.They are they are 1940 Act products. They don't fit under the 1933 commodity shares process, which we just had the approval for. So we know there's demand there. But what I think the most demand will be over the long term personally is these index products. I think a product like Bitcoin will probably always be the largest area of digital assets ETFs. I don't see that changing it – akin to gold, which they talked about on the last panel we were just at at this conference.

I think Ethereum, they have such a big lead, it's going to be hard for anything else to take up second place. But if anything does do it, I think it could be the index products personally because if you have, a lot of people they think of digital assets, they think bitcoin. Bitcoin is crypto, crypto is bitcoin, and they don't understand all these other long tail of assets.

And if you're an advisor, you might have some bitcoin exposure if you're interested in the space. You might just want a product that's going to give you beta to the entire thing. It's almost like, it's like the tech boom in the 90s, right? If you had tried to pick a couple of stocks, you probably blew up. But if you bought some sort of index, you ended up owning, you know, Google, Amazon, some of those really big high flyers. And I think that's probably how this is going to play out. I don't think you're going to be able to have 300 different assets in the digital asset space that become trillion dollar protocols, but you could get a few.

 
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## Will Crypto Index ETFs Be Varied Enough?

**Nadig:** It feels a little bit like the build out in commodities ETFs where initially everybody was like, “Well, people will buy oil, and they'll buy gold.” And then when you actually look at where all the assets ended up, a lot of that flow ended up into big boring indexes that included all those things and people picked up a little wheat along the way.

We've seen a bunch of those indexes launch. Some of those products are still trading in the trust. Like Bitwise has the Bitwise 10 product. I know Grayscale has their own versions. Everybody will end up with their own versions of these things. Is there much room for differentiation there or we're just going to end up with, you know, the one that BlackRock launches will get a bunch of assets and then Bitwise will get the institutional version, and then everybody else has to compete?

**Seyffart:** Yeah. I don't know. I hope that's not the way it breaks down. I think there's a lot of value to be out here, right? You could do market cap-weighted. I think a product, that there is a product out there now from CoinShares that's like – it doesn't hold bitcoin and ETH, but it does an equal-weighted exposure to a whole bunch of other assets.

I think if you do a market cap-weighted ex-bitcoin ETH or just ex-Bitcoin, somebody might want to choose their bitcoin exposure and then, you know, do what they want to do. And then you can have actively managed portfolios equally-weighted. But I think the market cap probably just because of the way that advisors think are going to be the winners.

**Nadig:** Well, do you think there's the demand there, right? Because what are we at in bitcoin ETFs now? We're at 90?

**Seyffart:** No, we're oh yeah, like I mean, [IBIT](https://www.etf.com/IBIT) alone came close to hitting 100 last time bitcoin… So we're at like 130, 140. But gold ETFs are by themselves. We actually – bitcoin ETFs came close to catching gold ETFs at one point. Now gold ETFs have gone away.

**Nadig:** But so we've got, there's we’ll call it 130 and then we've got the ETH ETFs, which are about 10% of the size.

**Seyffart:** Yeah, a little bit more than that.

## What Investors Actually Want in Crypto

**Nadig:** So, clearly there's a curve, right? Solana is going to be less, XRP is going to be less, and then we're going then we start getting into the coins that nobody really knows. Is there really demand for that? Outside, I mean, if you were interested in XRP as a portfolio asset, aren't you probably already owning your own crypto wallet and you can probably just get that yourself?

**Seyffart:** Honestly, that was kind of what everyone was telling me about the bitcoin ETFs, too. Keep in mind, right? Everyone was telling me the bitcoin ETFs, there will be demand, but if people really wanted exposure to bitcoin, they already have it. Same thing with the ethereum ETFs. I mean, the ethereum ETFs have taken in $15 billion, and almost all of that has come in the last six months, right?

So for whatever reason, you put it in an ETF wrapper, there are people who are interested in the space that just don't own it. If you're an advisor and you want to put 1% into these types of things, do you really want to go out and open a Coinbase account or Gemini account or so you just go with the ETF. So I think there will be demand, but I agree with you, the long tail, I don't know if you're going to get a lot of interest.

I think there's a lot of interest for things that are trading vehicles, right? So I think some of these longer tail assets will become trading vehicles. They can get tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in them in the ninth biggest digital asset potentially. Do I think it's going to be a $130 billion dollar category for one asset again? Almost certainly not.

But I think the index products, again, there are protocols out there that people think could become things that almost I don't want to say fully replace, but supplement what's going on in the traditional financial markets. That's a lot of the theory behind the things other than bitcoin. You can do tokenization, a lot of things. I know you're a big believer in tokenization, what it can do.

**Nadig:** Let's flip the script on that then. So that's the left side of the curve, the right side of the curve is how crypto as a technology, how blockchain as a technology, is impacting our TradFi markets. You know, the ETFization of crypto is alive and well and happening right now. The moving of traditional finance onto crypto rails or adopting some of the features of crypto rails feels like it's taking a lot longer. Am I wrong on that or do you feel like there's some shoes to drop relatively soon?

**Seyffart:** I'm fully with you. I think it's going to take a long time, right? I mean, there's still issues. We had an AWS server today when we're recording this and like it messed up some layer two protocols, right? There's a bunch of other things that kind of got messed up because of just, you know, the system.

**Nadig:** They kept the stock market open.

## A Slow Grind to Tokenization 

**Seyffart:** You can't do that, right? So let admittedly layer ones, Ethereum, Solana, they seem to be operating fine without much issue. But other layer two protocols, which theoretically a lot of this, you know, on chain tokenization stuff might be occurring on, you can't really have that happening. So one, I think there's just growth and the other thing is I think we are moving really quick, and these protocols, these layer ones are growing very fast. They're getting way more efficient.

You've played with this stuff back in 2017. The UX, the UI as somebody I would consider tech forward and tech savvy, was terrifying for me to use. It has gotten way better. It's still nowhere near Web Two or TradFi way of dealing with things. But I think a lot of this is going to be – there are people that call it the DeFi mullet. It's just TradFi, you know, FinTech on the front and then DeFi in the back is the party. I think that's the way things are going to go. But there's regulatory problems we need to sort out.

There's going to be, it's like this merging, right? Robin Hood's trying to do stuff.

**Nadig:** Schwab's talking about it, yeah.

**Seyffart:** Everyone's talking about it. I mean, Nasdaq's talking about doing tokenized stuff. I talked to people today – I won't say their names – who are looking in to do tokenized versions of their ETFs and things like that, right? This is going to happen. People are going to dip their toe in the water, see what the demand looks like, see what the use cases are.

Who knows where this is going to go, but I think it's just going to be a slow grind. Even if you get a few million dollars, or a couple hundred million dollars, to do these tokenized sorts of things, in the grand scheme of tens of trillions of dollars in the U.S. financial markets, it's still – it's a drop in the bucket.

## What Investors Are Missing in Crypto Right Now

**Nadig:** Alright, last question and I'll let you go. You've got your fingers on the pulse of this stuff. It's October 20th when we're recording this. What's the next shoe to drop? What's the next thing that you're like, “This is the thing that's going to be interesting,” people aren't paying attention to?

**Seyffart:** Oof, that people aren't paying attention to. I mean, what's going to happen is we're going to get 100 plus digital assets ETFs that come to market in the next six months.

**Nadig:** 100 plus next six months. Ok.

**Seyffart:** I think so. I’m tracking 150 different products that have been filed that’ve not launched yet. Some of those are leveraged products, so I don’t know if they count. But we’re talking about 35 different assets for a basket product that has – all those ETFs track it. So there’s a lot of filings out there. There’s some that will be more imminent than others. We need the government to reopen, we’re still in the shutdown while we’re recording this.

Solana I think will likely be the first to get an individual asset. We already have some indexed products. You mentioned Bitwise – they’re waiting to be able to convert so I assume when the government reopens, they will convert BITW into an ETF immediately. Grayscale’s already converted. So, it’s just going to be this massive flow of ETFs coming to market.

**Nadig:** All in the next six months.

**Seyffart:** All in the next six months. The thing is, much like the ETF industry is known to do, they throw spaghetti at the wall and they see what sticks. You go 12 months after that, I wouldn't be surprised you see a lot of them are going to be gone. Because people, one thing we actually did get right is people were arguing with us when the bitcoin ETFs were going to launch, that there's no way that 10 of these can launch and survive. And I was like, we were like, I don't know, there's like – everyone we're talking to, there’s someone adding a sliver of their portfolio into these things. If it's big enough, they get enough assets, it performs well enough, they can do well. I don't know if you can have 10 products for like I said, the fourth, fifth largest digital asset.

**Nadig:** Right, right. I mean, it's a little bit like the S&amp;P. We have, you know, I don't know, nine viable S&amp;P 500 ETFs, three have all the money. I think we're in the same boat with bitcoin.

**Seyffart:** Exactly. But even the 10th largest Bitcoin ETF is profitable. Yeah, they've, the performance of the underlying asset has done well enough. They've done well enough on flows to some small extent, that it's almost certainly profitable for them on a revenue and probably net margin basis.

**Nadig:** Slap more leverage on it, I'm sure it’s more profitable still. All right, thanks, James.

**Seyffart:** Thanks, Dave.



 

 

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