The seventy-five days that are not in the rule

A claim has been going round since Wednesday that the Securities and Exchange Commission has compressed its review of altcoin exchange-traded products from up to 240 days to roughly 75, opening a path for spot funds in Solana, XRP and Dogecoin, with a deadline on Sunday. Three things are wrong with it. The funds already trade. The seventy-five days are in no Commission document. And the deadline, which is real, concerns something else and was extended on Monday.

Start with the rule. On 17 September 2025 the Commission granted accelerated approval to proposals from Nasdaq, Cboe BZX and NYSE Arca adopting generic listing standards for Commodity-Based Trust Shares, at Release No. 34-103995. That was a year ago, and it is the event being re-reported this week.

What it did is more interesting than a shorter clock, because it is not a clock at all. The relief runs through Rule 19b-4(e), under which the listing of a new derivative securities product complying with an exchange's already-approved rules, surveillance programmes and listing standards "is not deemed a proposed rule change". No filing means no Section 19(b)(2) timetable: not the 45 days, not the extension to 90, not the 240-day outer limit. The exchange's only obligation is to post eight items about the product — issuer type, class, underlying, ticker, markets, settlement, position limits — on its website within five business days of trading starting. Calling the removal of a process a seventy-five-day process gets the direction of travel right and the mechanism exactly backwards.

Where, then, does the number come from? Not the order; this desk searched its full text and the figure does not appear. It is an estimate, widely attributed to Bloomberg's ETF analysts, of how long the Division of Corporation Finance takes to clear a Securities Act registration statement — the one gate the generic standards leave standing, and a gate with no deadline anybody can enforce. A registration statement takes effect automatically twenty days after filing under Section 8(a); issuers file delaying amendments precisely so that it does not, then wait for staff comments to stop. Seventy-five days describes staff behaviour in 2025, not an undertaking to repeat it.

The standards do contain one waiting period, and it decides which tokens qualify. Under Nasdaq Rule 5711(d)(iv)(A), each commodity held must trade on a market belonging to the Intermarket Surveillance Group; or underlie a futures contract "made available to trade on a designated contract market for at least six months", with a surveillance-sharing agreement in place; or, on an initial basis only, sit behind an exchange-traded fund giving at least 40 per cent of its net asset value in exposure to it. Six months, running on a futures contract rather than a fund. That is the queue.

Which is why the premise fails. Spot Solana funds began trading on 28 October 2025. Dogecoin has four listed vehicles, from REX-Osprey's on Cboe BZX that September to 21Shares' on Nasdaq in January. Spot XRP funds cleared in March and took in more than $1.5bn inside sixty days. The regulatory question closed last autumn; as this desk argued on 6 September, what remains is an asset-management question about which funds gather enough money to stay open.

Now the deadline. It is real, falls on 27 September, and has nothing to do with spot ETFs. On 28 July, Nasdaq ISE filed to adopt listing criteria for options on commodity-based trusts holding digital commodities. The Commission noticed it at Release No. 34-106067 on 10 August and published on the 13th, setting the 45th day under Section 19(b)(2) at Sunday. On 21 September it extended, "so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change", designating 11 November as the date by which it must approve, disapprove or open proceedings. That notice, Release No. 34-106448, ran in Thursday's Federal Register — the same day the seventy-five-day story was being written. It also records that no comments were filed.

What ISE is asking for deserves more attention than the arithmetic that displaced it. The purpose is to align the options rulebook with Nasdaq Rule 5711(d) as amended in July by SR-NASDAQ-2026-032, approved at Release No. 34-105995. That amendment replaced "crypto asset" with the narrower "digital commodity", drawn from the joint SEC and CFTC interpretative guidance effective 23 March; opened the standards to actively managed trusts; and created a buffer under which up to 15 per cent of a trust's net asset value may sit in holdings failing the eligibility criteria. ISE would carry the buffer across, so options could be listed on a trust where 15 per cent of the basket underlies no derivative on a surveilled market. Its defence is careful: every constituent must still clear an average daily global market value of $700m over twelve months, so "the liquidity standard thus operates as a uniform floor that applies to 100% of the trust's commodity holdings, even where the surveillance requirement applies to only 85%".

So, the sober version. Listing an altcoin fund no longer requires the Commission's permission at all, a larger change than a shorter deadline, and it happened a year ago. What is pending is narrower: whether options may be written on baskets only 85 per cent surveilled. An extension is not an approval, and that nobody filed a comment on the proposal says more about the state of the debate than any number of days does.