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The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, has said to have no plans to launch a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) offering investors exposure to the native token of the XRP Ledger, XRP.
According to Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino, sources with direct knowledge of the matter have revealed that BlackRock doesn’t plan on launching a spot XRP ETF.
SCOOP: @BlackRock has no plans for a spot $XRP ETF, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter story developing
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) January 18, 2024
The news comes after BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said last week that he “can’t talk about that,” referring to the company potentially launching an XRP ETF.
Fink’s comments fueled speculation that the firm could be looking into launching a spot XRP ETF, which would come on the heels of it launching a spot Bitcoin ETF, the iShares Bitcoin Trust.
The firm has also filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a spot Ether exchange-traded fund (ETF), called the iShares Ethereum Trust.
The fund’s goal is to “generally reflect the performance of the price of Ether,” as stated in the S-1 submitted to the SEC.
iShares is the name of BlackRock’s ETF offerings, and the custodian for the funds would be Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange that relisted XRP recently.
As reported, XRP has recently reached a new milestone when it comes to the number of wallets on the network, as it has recently surpassed the 5 million mark, a notable increase from last year’s start of 4 million.
See Also: SEC’s Analogy For Crypto Investment Made XRP Lawyers, John Deaton, Laugh
Recently, XRP transactions have also seen a surge, maintaining numbers well over 5 million since the start of the year, further pointing to the cryptocurrency’s growing adoption.
Over the past year, it’s worth noting, the price of XRP surged around 65%.
Nevertheless, a cryptocurrency analyst has suggested it could keep climbing to potentially reach $27 per token in a significant rise following Ripple’s legal victories over the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In 2020, Ripple faced a lawsuit from the SEC for supposedly breaching U.S. securities regulations by selling XRP without first registering with the agency.
Judge Analise Torres determined that XRP was indeed a security when Ripple initially sold it to institutional investors, but not when it was sold to the general public.
Judge Torres’ primary reasoning was that institutional investors who purchased XRP from Ripple likely understood that it possessed certain characteristics of a security.
However, this information was not necessarily available to those who acquired XRP through cryptocurrency exchanges.
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