The Securities and Exchange Commission granted accelerated approval to two products that hold both spot Bitcoin and spot Ether in a single ETF wrapper, with Hashdex's Nasdaq Crypto Index US ETF and Franklin Templeton's Crypto Index ETF poised to begin trading at NYSE Arca and Cboe BZX in early January. Both funds are weighted by market capitalization, producing an approximate 80-percent BTC and 20-percent ETH split at launch.
The structure is a meaningful regulatory step beyond the existing single-asset wrappers. It is the first time U.S. regulators have allowed a multi-asset crypto basket inside an ETF, opening a path for additional tokens — Hashdex's amended filing names Avalanche, Chainlink and Litecoin as candidates — to be added later, pending separate approval. And it gives registered investment advisers a single-ticker way to express a market-cap-weighted crypto allocation, which has long been a pain point for advisers steering retail clients through what would otherwise have been a multi-product portfolio rebalance every quarter.
Issuance details, lifted from the final S-1s, suggest a competitive product. Both ETFs will list at expense ratios under thirty basis points, with the Hashdex product positioned slightly cheaper. Custody is handled by Coinbase Custody for Hashdex and BNY Mellon for Franklin, with both products using the CF Benchmarks reference rate suite for daily mark-to-market. Liquidity providers including Jane Street, Flow Traders and Cumberland are named as authorized participants, and the trading desks at all three firms have already wired up the basket-creation infrastructure for the new tickers.
The buy-side pitch is straightforward. Roughly seventy-five percent of U.S. registered investment advisers do not currently hold any crypto-related product in their model portfolios, in part because their compliance teams require a single-ticker, market-cap-weighted instrument that can be rebalanced inside existing fund-management software. The combo ETF is engineered for that bench. Hashdex told Bloomberg that conversations with three of the largest U.S. RIA aggregators have already produced soft commitments to evaluate the product for inclusion in default model portfolios in the first half of the year.
For the broader regulated-product complex, the multi-asset clearance is more important than the specific assets it includes. The SEC's prior posture had treated each token as a separate, fully bespoke approval question, an approach that effectively limited issuers to single-asset wrappers and slow incremental approvals. The combo structure is, in effect, a precedent for index-style multi-asset products. Issuers including Bitwise, BlackRock, and 21Shares are widely understood to have similar multi-asset filings drafted and ready to submit, with several explicitly waiting on the Hashdex outcome to gauge the agency's willingness to approve a broader basket.
The next data point to watch is the launch-week flow profile. The market will read the early volume against both the spot Bitcoin and spot Ether ETF complexes; meaningful adviser-platform inclusion in the first quarter would suggest the structure is filling a real distribution gap. The follow-on filings will be more telling still — if Hashdex or Franklin successfully amend their products to include additional altcoins later in the year, the SEC will have effectively re-opened the door to broader index exposure, with implications well beyond the immediate combo wrappers.