Cboe filed four proposals for spot XRP exchange-traded products

Cboe BZX Exchange filed four proposed rule changes with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 6, 2025, seeking permission to list exchange-traded products that would hold XRP. The filings covered proposed funds from WisdomTree, Bitwise, 21Shares and Canary Capital.

The batch was consequential because it moved four issuer plans from registration statements into the exchange-listing process. It did not approve any product, authorize trading or settle XRP’s regulatory classification. On February 6, the verified development was the filing of four proposals—not the launch of four funds.

Four filings, one underlying asset

The proposals were numbered SR-CboeBZX-2025-019 through SR-CboeBZX-2025-022. In order, they concerned the WisdomTree XRP Fund, Bitwise XRP ETF, 21Shares Core XRP Trust and Canary XRP Trust. Each asked to list shares under BZX Rule 14.11(e)(4), the exchange’s rule for Commodity-Based Trust Shares.

That rule label described the listing route Cboe chose. It should not be read as a separate SEC determination on February 6 that XRP was legally a commodity in every transaction or context.

The filings described passive trusts intended to hold XRP and give shareholders price exposure through brokerage accounts. They also set out proposed custody, valuation, creation-and-redemption, surveillance, disclosure and trading-halt arrangements. Those details mattered institutionally because an exchange-traded wrapper shifts some operational tasks—such as safeguarding the underlying asset and calculating net asset value—from an investor to a regulated product structure. It does not remove XRP price volatility, tracking differences, custody risk or regulatory uncertainty.

Why the listing step mattered

An issuer registration statement and an exchange rule filing perform different jobs. The sponsors had already placed registration statements for their proposed products on the SEC’s public record. Cboe’s February 6 submissions addressed whether BZX could list and trade the shares under its rules and the Exchange Act.

The four filings therefore opened a formal review path, but they were applications rather than decisions. The SEC still had to publish notices and evaluate whether the proposals were consistent with exchange-law requirements, including protections against fraudulent and manipulative practices. Product registration also had to become effective before a fund could begin offering shares.

The institutional context was the expansion of the U.S. crypto exchange-traded-product pipeline beyond bitcoin and ether. Cboe argued in the filings that its XRP proposals could use surveillance and investor-protection mechanisms comparable to those applied to approved spot crypto products. That was the exchange’s legal and market-structure case, not a Commission finding.

XRP also carried litigation-specific uncertainty. A federal district court’s 2023 summary-judgment order in the SEC’s case against Ripple distinguished among transaction types: it found Ripple’s institutional sales were investment-contract sales while certain programmatic sales were not. The existence of that mixed ruling made the ETF filings especially notable, but the filings themselves did not resolve the wider litigation or create a generally applicable classification for every XRP transaction.

What remained unresolved

No event-day conclusion could responsibly be drawn about approval odds, launch timing, investor demand or likely fund flows. The February 6 documents supplied proposals and arguments, not trading data or a Commission vote. This reconstruction therefore makes no XRP price, volume or market-cap claim.

The SEC issued public notices for the four filings between February 14 and February 19, 2025. Those later notices corroborated that Cboe filed the proposals on February 6 and began the public-comment phase. They did not turn the February 6 applications into approvals, and no later product outcome is projected backward into this event record.