21Shares Solana ETF began trading on Cboe with staking in its mandate

The 21Shares Solana ETF began trading under the ticker TSOL on Cboe BZX on November 19, 2025, giving U.S. brokerage investors another exchange-listed route to price exposure tied to SOL, the native asset of the Solana network. The launch mattered because it widened the regulated product market beyond the bitcoin and ether funds that had established the principal U.S. spot-crypto categories.

Cboe identified November 19 as TSOL’s first trading date and scheduled the new issue to begin trading at 4:00 a.m. Eastern Time. At 9:30 a.m. Eastern, 21Shares announced the launch and described the product as tracking SOL while incorporating staking into its return objective.

What the fund was designed to hold

The prospectus described TSOL as a passive vehicle holding SOL rather than futures or a leveraged derivative strategy. Its benchmark at launch was the CME CF Solana-Dollar Reference Rate — New York Variant, an index calculated from executed trade flow across selected SOL trading platforms. The trust was to value its shares daily from that benchmark, adjusted for expenses and other liabilities.

The product did not give shareholders direct possession of SOL. Investors bought shares through securities accounts, while Coinbase Custody Trust Company, Anchorage Digital Bank and BitGo Trust Company were identified as custodians for the trust’s underlying assets. Ordinary shareholders could trade shares on the exchange but could not individually redeem them for SOL; creation and redemption activity occurred through authorized participants in blocks of 10,000 shares.

The launch materials listed a 0.21% expense ratio. The prospectus also disclosed that the sponsor would receive 10% of rewards generated through the staking program. Those percentages measured different charges: the first was the stated annual fund expense ratio, while the second applied to staking rewards rather than the trust’s total assets.

Staking came with important conditions

21Shares promoted staking as a distinguishing feature, but the prospectus used more qualified language. The investment objective sought to reflect rewards from staking a portion of the trust’s SOL only when the sponsor determined that staking could proceed without undue legal, regulatory or tax risk. The filing therefore did not promise that every SOL token would be continuously staked or that a fixed reward rate would be earned.

That distinction mattered operationally. Staked SOL can become temporarily unavailable during bonding or unstaking processes, potentially complicating liquidity needed for share redemptions. Validator performance, network interruptions, custody failures and changes in reward rates could also reduce or eliminate expected benefits. Staking rewards were consequently a contingent component of the structure, not guaranteed yield.

The trust was also not registered as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Its prospectus warned that shareholders would not receive the regulatory protections applicable to registered mutual funds and investment companies. SEC effectiveness of the registration statement therefore enabled the offering to proceed; it was not a merits endorsement of SOL, Solana or TSOL.

Why the November 19 launch mattered

TSOL was not the first U.S. exchange-traded product linked to Solana. Its significance came from adding another issuer, fee structure, custody arrangement and staking policy to a rapidly developing category. Competition among products could make access easier through conventional brokerage infrastructure, but it did not remove SOL’s price volatility, custody risks or network-specific risks.

The launch also separated regulated securities distribution from the legal classification of the underlying asset. Shares could trade on a national securities exchange even while questions surrounding digital-asset regulation remained unsettled. That structure offered institutional familiarity without converting SOL itself into a stock, deposit or government-backed instrument.

No event-day price, volume, asset-flow or staking-reward claim is necessary to establish the development. The verified November 19 record is narrower: TSOL entered exchange trading, held SOL through a trust structure and included conditional staking rewards in its mandate. Whether investors would adopt it at scale remained unknown when trading began.