Grayscale Pulled Its Cardano ETF Filing Two Days Before It Qualified

CME listed ADA futures on 9 Feb. The seasoning period ran out on 9 Aug. Grayscale, whose filing was the furthest advanced of any Cardano application, pulled it on the Friday in between.

It withdrew its Hedera (HBAR) and Polkadot (DOT) registrations at the same time. All three requests were filed after the close of trading and inside a window of 190 seconds, accepted by the regulator at 20:33UTC, 20:34UTC and 20:36UTC, according to its records. No reasoning has been given beyond the standard formulation that the company does not intend to proceed with the planned distribution of the shares, and nothing in the filings prevents it from submitting again.

All three registrations had been dormant for months. Cardano and Polkadot were filed on 29 Aug 2025 and amended once, in October. Hedera followed on 9 Sep 2025 and was never amended at all. None was declared effective, and no shares were ever issued or sold.

Grayscale still maintains funds centred on altcoins, but it is not the dominant sponsor in any of them. Its XRP Trust ETF (GXRP) had a market capitalization of $48.6mn on Monday, about 7% of the $653mn across the four US XRP funds, where Bitwise's product alone accounts for $232.1mn. Its Solana Staking ETF (GSOL) stood at $96.1mn, roughly 12% of the $779.4mn US Solana ETF market, behind Bitwise's $567.5mn. Figures are from CoinGlass at 13:40UTC on 10 Aug.

Nothing was standing in Grayscale's way

The generic listing standards, approved in mid-September 2025, allowed qualifying crypto products to list without a separate rule change for each fund. Cardano and Polkadot had been filed in late August, before the standards were in place, with Hedera following days after the approval during a market-wide push for crypto ETFs.

Their effect was to make eligibility a matter of process rather than a discretionary decision on each token. That is what makes the Cardano timing hard to explain. Grayscale was not withdrawing in the face of a new obstacle or an adverse ruling. The route to a spot listing had been open for eleven months and was about to become available for the asset in question, and it withdrew two days short.

Thin demand across altcoin funds, and a possibly more stringent test of which tokens will attract investment, would account for Hedera and Polkadot. It does not obviously account for abandoning the leading Cardano application at the threshold. One alternative reading deserves stating: ADA's status as a security remains unresolved, which is a different reason to drop a filing than weak flows.

The wider market gives it little encouragement either way. XRP and Solana are the only altcoins with meaningfully traded US funds, and between them those markets are worth about $1.43bn. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) held $47.9bn on the same measure, so the two largest altcoin ETF markets together amount to 3% of a single bitcoin fund.

The tokens themselves barely registered it

Neither the filings nor the reporting of them moved the three tokens.

The withdrawals were accepted between 20:33UTC and 20:36UTC on Friday, after the US equity close but with crypto trading normally. In that hour ADA rose 0.7% to $0.2022, HBAR 0.3% and DOT 0.6%, each continuing a drift that had begun earlier in the session. When the withdrawals were first widely reported at 05:38UTC on Monday, the response was the same: ADA gained 0.5% in that hour, HBAR 0.2% and DOT 0.8%. By 13:00UTC on Monday, ADA was 3.4% below its Friday evening level, HBAR 0.7% above it and DOT unchanged.

The absence is more striking than a fall would have been. ADA had risen more than 20% in the week to 9 Aug on optimism about the futures seasoning completing and a spot fund becoming possible. The leading application was withdrawn two days before that date, and the token did not move.

Two readings are available, and the evidence does not separate them. Either investors never priced Grayscale's filing as the thing that mattered, which would fit registrations left dormant for months. Or nobody had read a Form RW filed after the close on a Friday, and Monday's coverage was too thin to shift a token. The rally into 9 Aug suggests the market was buying the eligibility date rather than any particular sponsor's application.

Little upside for the sponsors that stayed

In the three markets Grayscale has walked away from, 21Shares' Polkadot fund TDOT and Canary's Hedera fund HBR are the only dedicated products. No spot Cardano ETF exists, although futures-based ADA funds have traded since April.

Both existing funds have seen low activity and offer their sponsors little. TDOT, listed in March, has recorded only four days of inflows and $1.9mn of net inflows since listing, and holds $7.41mn. At a 0.30% fee, that is worth about $22,000 a year to 21Shares. HBR, listed in Oct 2025, attracted net inflows of $105mn and holds $47.6mn as the price of the underlying asset has declined. On a 0.95% fee, it produces roughly $450,000 a year. Fund figures are from TradingView.

The scale of the disincentive is easier to see against Grayscale's own bitcoin business. Its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC) held $8.61bn on Monday and charges 1.50%, an annual fee of roughly $129mn. GBTC earns what TDOT earns in a year in about 90 minutes.

Seven withdrawn registrations this year

Seven US crypto ETF registrations have now been withdrawn during 2026, according to SEC records, and Grayscale's three are the largest single group. Yorkville America Digital pulled three Truth Social funds on 19 May, covering bitcoin, a combined bitcoin and Ether product and a crypto blue chip fund. Bitwise withdrew a bitcoin and Ether fund on 15 Jun. CoinShares had already abandoned a Solana staking ETF on 28 Nov 2025, two months after filing the last of three amendments to its registration.

Yorkville America's position is worth noting alongside the terminated Crypto.com partnership announced on 7 Aug, under which Crypto.com was to have serviced certain of its anticipated ETF offerings. That announcement said Yorkville America's existing and future ETF plans were otherwise unchanged, three months after it withdrew three registrations.

Grayscale retains live preliminary registrations covering five other tokens, including Zcash, which it amended for a third time on 31 Jul.

Sandmark put questions to Grayscale on 10 Aug on the timing of the withdrawals, whether the decision predated last week, and whether it intends to register the products again. Grayscale had yet to respond at the time of publication.