Staking ETF: the SEC must decide by November 15, and Europe has had the product since January

A staking ETF is an exchange-traded fund that does not simply hold a cryptocurrency but puts it to work in the network and passes the proceeds on to shareholders. Not one of them exists in the United States today. That changes on November 15, 2026 at the latest: by that date the Securities and Exchange Commission must rule on the VanEck JitoSOL ETF, and it can no longer push the deadline back. What follows is either the first American fund on a liquid staking token, or a written rejection.

For investors in Europe, this is more than a headline out of Washington, for two reasons. First, this exact product has been sitting on the shelf in Europe since January 2026, and almost nobody noticed. Second, the wrapper holds something other than what the name suggests: the fund holds JitoSOL and not Solana, and one JitoSOL currently costs around a third more than one Solana. Miss that distinction and you are comparing apples with pears at the point of purchase.

What sits inside a staking ETF: JitoSOL rather than Solana

Liquid staking works like this: you hand your coins over to a network so they can secure transactions, but you immediately receive a tradable substitute token in return. That substitute is the liquid staking token, or LST. It is the receipt proving that coins are posted somewhere in the network on your behalf, and it can be sold on at any time without the posted coins having to be released first.

On the Solana blockchain, JitoSOL is the largest of these substitute tokens. It comes from the Jito stake pool, which currently has roughly 8 million JitoSOL in circulation, worth a good $1.1 billion in total. On Ethereum the equivalent is called stETH and comes from Lido. Both work on the same principle, and both are the actual contents of the fund wrappers now under discussion.

The difference from an ordinary crypto fund is therefore not cosmetic. A spot fund on Solana holds Solana. A fund on JitoSOL holds a claim against a stake pool that in turn holds Solana. An additional layer of software sits between you and the coin, and that layer is why the SEC has taken almost eight months across three procedural stages without reaching a decision.

The SEC clock: 180 days from March 20, plus a 60-day extension

The deadline is not an estimate, it is a calculation set out in statute. Nasdaq filed the application on March 10, 2026, and it was published on March 20. Section 19(b)(2) of the Securities Exchange Act gives the Commission 180 days from that publication to approve or reject. Day 180 fell on September 16, 2026. The SEC may extend that deadline by a maximum of 60 further days, and that is precisely what it did with its notice of September 14. September 16 plus 60 days lands on November 15, 2026. The rule makes no provision for a further extension.

The path to that date is documented without a gap in the Federal Register: on May 1, 2026 the Commission stretched the period for the first time, on June 17 it instituted formal proceedings, and on September 9 it signed off the last extension available to it. One line in the document is easy to overlook and worth noting: The Commission has received no comment letters on the proposed rule change. Not a single comment letter has come in on this application in eight months. The delay therefore does not stem from public opposition.

Why one JitoSOL costs $137 and one Solana costs $105

This is where most accounts turn imprecise. Solana trades at $105.47, or €94.06, on Thursday morning, a good 1 percent above the previous day. JitoSOL trades at $137.62 at the same moment. That is not a premium and not a scarcity mark-up, it is simply accumulated yield.

The mechanism behind it is simple and rarely explained. A stake pool like Jito does not pay out staking rewards. It throws them back into the pot and thereby shifts the exchange ratio. At launch, one JitoSOL was worth one Solana. Today one JitoSOL corresponds to roughly 1.30 Solana, because $137.62 divided by $105.47 gives 1.3048. Those 30 percent are three years of yield, built into the price rather than sitting in an account. That matters when you do the math: the unit count tells you nothing. Two products bought with the same amount of money hold different numbers of units, and comparing prices per unit compares wrappers rather than contents.

That same point is what makes the case awkward for the regulator. The value of the fund share depends on the price of Solana and, on top of that, on the stake pool updating its exchange ratio correctly. If the software fails or the pool runs into trouble, JitoSOL can come loose from the Solana posted behind it. A fund on JitoSOL carries that risk in addition to price risk, and it is the main difference from every product in our overview of the crypto ETFs and ETPs tradable in Germany.

4.57 percent in the Jito stake pool against 3.72 percent across the network

What the extra building block brings in can be quantified. The Jito stake pool currently reports an annual yield of 4.57 percent. Across all Solana validators the average yield stands at 3.72 percent, according to the analytics service Stakewiz. The difference of roughly 0.85 percentage points comes from so-called MEV revenue: additional payments from traders who want their transactions placed in a block ahead of others. Jito passes part of those payments on to depositors; an ordinary validator usually does not.

That is the economic case for a fund taking the detour via an LST rather than staking itself. The edge is not enormous, but it is measurable, and it compounds over the years. It is also variable: MEV revenue depends on trading activity on Solana and can fall sharply in quiet weeks.

VanEck withdraws the Lido application and stays committed on Solana

On October 14, 2026, VanEck Digital Assets filed a Form RW with the SEC, withdrawing the registration of the VanEck Lido Staked Ethereum ETF. The letter gives as its reason that the sponsor does not intend to proceed with the contemplated offering of the shares. The registration had been filed on October 16, 2025, it was never declared effective, and no shares were issued.

The same house is therefore retreating from liquid staking on the Ethereum side while remaining locked into a proceeding on the Solana side that must be decided within four weeks. The withdrawal expressly concerns only that one registration; the JitoSOL application runs on unchanged. The form says nothing about the reasons, as withdrawals under Rule 477 never do. What the filings do show is the pattern: of two applications for the same product type, one is left, and it faces a decision the applicant can no longer avert.

Europe has had the JitoSOL wrapper since January, and assets stand at $1.19 million

While negotiations continue in the United States, the product has been trading in Europe for nine months. On January 28, 2026, 21Shares launched the Jito Staked SOL ETP, ticker JSOL, ISIN CH1521714696, German securities identification number A4ARA2, with an annual fee of 0.99 percent. It trades on the Euronext venues in Amsterdam and Paris, not on Xetra. It is reachable through a German brokerage account with access to foreign venues, but not through a domestic-only account.

The second figure on the same product page is the more interesting one: assets under management come to $1,189,991.94, with 70,000 shares outstanding and a net asset value of $17.00 per share. Measured against the market value of all JitoSOL, a good $1.1 billion, this ETP holds about one-thousandth of the token. Europe's head start exists on paper, then, but in practice almost nobody is using it.

A staking ETP on Xetra, a staking ETF in New York, your own staking in a wallet

Three routes lead to staking yield, and they differ in what you end up owning.

First, the European staking ETP. The 21Shares Solana Staking ETP, for instance, trades on Xetra under ISIN CH1114873776 and securities number A3GSS0, on every exchange day between 9am and 5:30pm. You buy it in an ordinary securities account, like a share. The staking proceeds are retained inside the product rather than distributed; we broke down how that differs from American practice on September 30 in our analysis of the 21Shares distributions.

Second, the American staking ETF. Even after an approval, retail investors in Germany will not be able to buy it, because US funds have no key information document under European law. We ran the same situation through the numbers on October 15 with the Polkadot fund against the German ETP. An approval would work here by the indirect route, opening American institutional pools a way into JitoSOL, which can feed through to demand for the token.

Third, staking it yourself. You hold the coins and delegate them to a validator or a stake pool. There is no product fee, but custody, validator selection and the risk of deductions for misbehaviour are yours. Which providers are worth considering and how much of the yield they keep is set out in our comparison of staking platforms.

Issuer risk: an ETN is a debt security, not ring-fenced fund assets

One point regularly gets lost in the language of ETFs. What trades in Europe as a crypto ETP is almost always a debt security in legal terms, that is, an ETN. Unlike a fund under European investment law, your money does not sit in ring-fenced assets protected against insolvency. Issuer risk is therefore added to the price risk of the coin and the risk of the stake pool. Providers mitigate it through physical collateralisation and third-party custody, but they cannot remove it.

The delivery claim decides the tax treatment, and it is unsettled

For taxation in Germany, the prevailing view turns on whether the security grants you a claim to delivery of the actual coins. If it does, Section 23 of the Income Tax Act applies, with its one-year period after which a disposal gain can remain tax-free. If it does not, the paper counts as an ordinary security, and gains are subject to the 25 percent withholding tax plus the solidarity surcharge, regardless of how long you held. That split has still not been settled in law; the details and the state of the sources are set out in our examination of the tax question on staking ETPs from August 16, 2026.

With your own staking the position is different, but no more trivial: ongoing rewards have to be valued at the moment they accrue, and the sale of the coins follows the rules for private disposals. Which of the three wrappers is more favourable for you in tax terms depends on your personal tax rate, your holding period and the outcome of the open legal questions. That is a question for your tax adviser, not for an article.

Our assessment: the precedent weighs more than the product

In the editorial team's view, November 15 matters less for the Solana price than the noise suggests, and more for the product landscape. Three pieces of evidence support that. First, the European example shows that the mere availability of a JitoSOL wrapper moves little: $1.19 million in assets after nine months is about one-thousandth of the token's value. Second, not a single comment letter has arrived on the American application in eight months, which points to a niche topic rather than pent-up demand. Third, an approval would still be a watershed, because the SEC would for the first time be clearing a fund on a derivative of a staking process, and the applications for stETH and further LSTs now sitting in the queue hang on that.

Against it stands the counter-calculation: on October 14, VanEck withdrew one of its own two registrations. Anyone who regards this product type as close to a breakthrough has to explain why the same provider is giving up the Ethereum variant. No price forecast follows from either side, and the fact that a total loss remains possible with every one of these products is not changed by an approval either.

Staking ETF: until November 15 the decision rests with the SEC

1. Settle first what you actually want to hold. For staking yield without the brokerage detour, the direct route runs through a platform that stakes; which ones do so on what terms is set out in our comparison of staking platforms.
2. Set up your tax records before the first proceeds start running. You will later have to document the accrual date and the price of every reward; the tools for that are in our comparison of crypto tax tools.
3. When buying Solana, check the total cost rather than the unit price. For the same amount, spreads and fees differ noticeably between venues; our comparison of crypto exchanges provides the overview.

(As of October 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)