The upcoming launch of Solana (SOL) futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a US derivatives trade, alerts that the primary US SOL exchange-traded fund (ETF) listings are coming quickly, Chris Chung, founding father of Solana-based swap platform Titan, advised Cointelegraph. 

On March 17, CME is preparing to launch SOL futures contracts. They will probably be among the many first regulated Solana futures to hit the US market after Coinbase’s launched in February. 

The itemizing “paves the way for the eventual approval of SOL ETFs,” Chung advised Cointelegraph.

Chung mentioned he expects the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to approve asset managers VanEck and Canary Capital’s proposed spot Solana ETFs as quickly as May.

The existence of regulated Solana futures “signals to regulators that Solana is maturing as an asset, making it easier for them to greenlight additional financial products of similar risk and type,” Chung mentioned. 

Futures contracts are standardized agreements to purchase or promote an underlying asset at a future date. They play a vital supporting position for spot cryptocurrency ETFs as a result of regulated futures markets present a secure benchmark for measuring a digital asset’s efficiency.

CME already lists futures contracts for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). US regulators permitted ETFs for each of these cryptocurrencies final yr. 

Related: CME Group reports record crypto volumes for Q4

Beyond memecoins

Additionally, Solana futures and ETFs will assist develop Solana’s progress story past memecoins, which had been central to the blockchain community’s success in 2024, Chung mentioned.

These merchandise “will bring more serious, sticky capital and pave the way for the development of other real-world use cases, such as payments and remittances,” in accordance with Chung. 

Those use circumstances are “[f]ar more boring than memecoins, perhaps, but a reliable source of long-term revenue that will buoy Solana’s price in the next bear market.”

Memecoin buying and selling, largely tied to the favored Pump.enjoyable platform, includes roughly 80% of the Solana blockchain community’s revenues, in accordance with asset supervisor VanEck.

However, exercise on the Solana community declined in February after a sequence of memecoin-related scandals soured sentiment amongst retail merchants. 

Rivaling Ethereum

Still, cryptocurrency trading volumes on Solana proceed to rival these of the complete Ethereum ecosystem, together with its layer-2 scaling chains, VanEck mentioned on March 6. 

Chung mentioned he expects Solana ETFs to take off amongst retail traders, partly due to the challenges going through rival good contract platform Ethereum. 

Solana’s native SOL token has carried out about twice in addition to Ether since early 2024, in accordance with TradingView. 

Ethereum’s spot value has struggled since March 2024, when the community’s Dencun improve minimize transaction charges by roughly 95%. 

“With the extremely weak price action we’re seeing in ETH, Solana is now the only option for retail investors wanting to get exposure to crypto beyond Bitcoin, but not willing to go full degen,” Chung mentioned.

Bloomberg Intelligence has set the chances of the SEC approving spot Solana and Litecoin ETFs at 70%.

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