Issuers File for ETFs Tracking Newly Debuted Circle Stock

Circle Internet Group Inc. (CRCL) may have just made its debut as a public company last week, but that hasn’t stopped fund providers from looking to launch exchange-traded funds based on its stock performance.

On Friday, Bitwise submitted a preliminary prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission for the Bitwise CRCL Option Income Strategy ETF, an actively managed ETF that tracks the share price of Circle using a covered call strategy. On the same day, ProShares submitted a filing for the ProShares Ultra CRCL ETF, a 2x leveraged fund also tracking CRCL.

The management fees and tickers weren’t shared in either filing. The effective dates would be August 20, 2025.

Bitwise declined to comment to etf.com as it’s in a quiet period. ProShares and Circle did not respond to requests for commentary.

REX Shares Speeds up Its Timeline 

Another fund provider, REX Shares, is now on track to beat ProShares and Bitwise to market with its new ETF tracking Circle by a week and a half. On June 9, a new filing was published for the T-REX 2X Long CRCL Daily Target ETF, replacing an earlier filing.

As Bloomberg ETF analyst Henry Jim explained in an X post, "T-Rex pulls classic ETF switcheroo, recycling existing ETF filing and thus shortening effective date to beat out ProShares (and Bitwise) by 9 days."

The effective date for the new T-REX ETF, which aims to magnify (by 200%) the daily performance of Circle’s stock, is August 11, 2025, according to the new prospectus.

REX Shares declined to comment to etf.com as it is in a quiet period. 

What is CRCL? 

Founded in 2013, peer-to-peer payments company Circle is the issuer of USDC, the second-largest stablecoin. It’s one of the few pure-play crypto companies listed on the U.S. stock market.

Circle’s shares were priced at $31 on Wednesday, June 11,  and opened at $69 on the New York Stock Exchange amid investor demand. The stock experienced a significant surge when it first hit the market and, as of midday Wednesday, its price is roughly $115 per share.

New ETFs Warrant Caution

Funds like the Bitwise CRCL Option Income Strategy ETF and ProShares Ultra CRCL ETF are aimed at very short-term speculative investors, and should be avoided by most other investors, said Daniel Sotiroff, senior manager research analyst for Morningstar Research.

Leveraged ETFs, he explained, tend to succumb to volatility drag and perform poorly over the long run. 

“It always goes wrong,” Sotiroff added. “I’ve never seen those things work.”

When it comes to covered calls, they’re typically a play on yield: The more volatile the underlying asset is, the higher the premiums are that you’re going to be able to write, he said.

“There’s a lot of this stuff out there, and it fits into the same mold of stuff that investors should ignore—and they’ll be better off for it,” said Sotiroff, who recently analyzed the 4,000 ETFs that traded on U.S. exchanges at the end of March 2025 and found that only 461 of them might be considered good, long-term options. 

Editor's note: This article was updated June 11, 2025, to add information about the REX Shares ETF filing.