Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Friday, May 24th, and today we are talking about the approval of the

Ethereum Spot ETF. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown,

please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into

the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go

to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, well, rounding out the biggest ever week in crypto policy,

the SEC has approved Spot Ethereum ETFs. Kind of. On Thursday afternoon, the Division of

Markets and Trading approved 19B4 rule change applications for all eight Ethereum products.

There was no announcement regarding

the accompanying S1 product disclosure filing, so those are presumably still being considered.

Both sets of filing must be approved before the products can begin trading. This split

process was generally expected by most analysts, given how last minute the decision to approve

appeared to be. The S1 process is handled by a separate

division of the SEC, and revisions to these filings took months of back and forth with SEC staff

in the lead-up to the launch of Bitcoin ETFs, even though they were ready at the same time as the

19B4 approvals. There is some sense that SEC staff have already cleared up most of the thornyer

issues during the Bitcoin revisions, so it might not take as long this time around. However, by all accounts, SEC staff were

completely blindsided by the approval, so have only just started to work on S1 revisions.

Bloomberg ETF analyst James Safart said to expect the final sign-off to take, quote,

a couple weeks but could take longer. Typically, this process takes months, like

up to five months in some examples, but we think this will be at least somewhat accelerated.

...