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The global investment management giant VanEck has filed for a new Lido Staked Ether (stETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the US.
Documents submitted to the state of Delaware on Monday indicate the ETF, if approved, would be tied to the price of stETH, a liquid staking token on the Lido protocol.
Lido Staked Ether is based on the underlying ownership of Ethereum (ETH) and earns staking rewards.
In August, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that liquid staking activities do not involve the offer and sale of securities and do not need to be registered with the regulator.
Kean Gilbert, head of institutional relations at the Lido Ecosystem Foundation, says VanEck’s new ETF application signals “growing recognition that liquid staking is an essential part of Ethereum’s infrastructure.”
“Lido protocol’s stETH has shown that decentralization and institutional standards can coexist, providing a foundation the broader market can build on.”
Lido Institutional says that users have earned more than $2 billion in staking rewards since the launch of the Lido protocol, which the decentralized finance data aggregator DeFi Llama notes has more than $34.2 billion in total value locked (TVL).
TVL refers to the amount of capital deposited within a protocol’s smart contracts and is often used to gauge the health of a crypto ecosystem.
