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The upcoming launch of Solana (SOL) futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a US derivatives exchange, signals that the first US SOL exchange-traded fund (ETF) listings are coming soon, Chris Chung, founder of Solana-based swap platform Titan, told Cointelegraph. 

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

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

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

Futures contracts are standardized agreements to buy or sell an underlying asset at a future date. They play a crucial supporting role for spot cryptocurrency ETFs because regulated futures markets provide a stable benchmark for measuring a digital asset’s performance.

CME already lists futures contracts for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). US regulators approved ETFs for both of those cryptocurrencies last year. 

Related: CME Group reports record crypto volumes for Q4

Beyond memecoins

Additionally, Solana futures and ETFs will help expand Solana’s growth story beyond memecoins, which were central to the blockchain network’s success in 2024, Chung said.

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

Those use cases 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 trading, largely tied to the popular Pump.fun platform, comprises roughly 80% of the Solana blockchain network’s revenues, according to asset manager VanEck.

However, activity on the Solana network declined in February after a series of memecoin-related scandals soured sentiment among retail traders. 

Rivaling Ethereum

Still, cryptocurrency trading volumes on Solana continue to rival those of the entire Ethereum ecosystem, including its layer-2 scaling chains, VanEck said on March 6. 

Chung said he expects Solana ETFs to take off among retail investors, partly because of the challenges facing rival smart contract platform Ethereum. 

Solana’s native SOL token has performed about twice as well as Ether since early 2024, according to TradingView. 

Ethereum’s spot price has struggled since March 2024, when the network’s Dencun upgrade cut transaction fees by approximately 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 said.

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

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Digital asset exchange DigiFT has launched Invesco’s tokenized private credit strategy on Arbitrum, further expanding the use cases of real-world assets (RWA) and giving institutional investors access to onchain credit markets.

According to a March 13 announcement, Invesco’s US Senior Loan Strategy (iSNR) token is now live on Arbitrum, a popular Ethereum layer-2 network.

The tokenized asset was launched on Feb. 19 and is designed to track the performance of a private credit fund managed by Invesco, a publicly traded investment manager headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. 

At the time of launch, the Invesco fund had $6.3 billion in assets under management, according to Bloomberg. 

DigiFT described the iSNR token as the “first and only tokenized private credit strategy.”

DigiFT CEO Henry Zhang said adding iSNR to Aribitrum increases its utility by “allowing DeFi applications, DAOs and institutional investors to integrate with a regulated, onchain private credit strategy.”

Consistent with the initial launch of iSNR on Ethereum last month, investors on Arbitrum can purchase tokenized shares using popular stablecoins USDC (USDC) and USDt (USDT).

Related: Cantor Fitzgerald taps Anchorage Digital, Copper as Bitcoin custodians

DeFi tokenization on the rise

Despite the recent crypto market downtrend, RWA tokenization appears to be heating up with the launch of several DeFi-oriented products. Positive regulatory developments, the rise of liquid multichain economies and innovations in decentralized exchanges are expected to push RWA tokenization into the crypto limelight this year. 

Earlier this week, tokenization company Securitize announced that oracle provider RedStone will deliver price feeds for its tokenized products, which include the BlackRock USD Institutional Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) and the Apollo Diversified Credit Securitize Fund (ACRED). 

The integration means that Securitize’s funds “can now be utilized across DeFi protocols such as Morpho, Compound or Spark,” RedStone’s chief operating officer, Marcin Kazmierczak, told Cointelegraph. 

Meanwhile, asset manager Franklin Templeton has launched a tokenized money fund on the Coinbase layer-2 network Base and a US government money fund on Solana. 

According to industry data, the total value of RWAs onchain has grown by 17.5% over the past 30 days to reach $18.1 billion. Private credit and US Treasury debt account for nearly 91% of that total. 

Related: Trump-era policies may fuel tokenized real-world assets surge

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