VanEck withdraws filing for Lido staked Ether ETF a year after first submission

Asset manager VanEck has dropped plans for an exchange-traded fund that would have held stETH, the liquid staking token issued by Lido. VanEck Digital Assets filed a request for withdrawal (Form RW) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 14 covering the S-1 registration statement of the VanEck Lido Staked Ethereum ETF. The filing said the sponsor "does not intend to proceed with the planned distribution" of the trust's shares and gave no other reason.

A registration statement that stayed blank for nearly a year

VanEck first filed the fund's S-1 on Oct. 16, 2025. The SEC's filing index lists only two documents under the trust's name: that S-1 and the withdrawal request. The original S-1 left the sponsor fee, the listing exchange, the ticker and the name of the stETH custodian blank, and no amendment filling them in was ever submitted.

The withdrawal request states that the registration statement was never declared effective, that no securities were issued or sold under it, and that none will be. It was signed by Matthew A. Babinsky, vice president of VanEck Digital Assets.

The fund would have held stETH and collected staking rewards

Users who deposit ether (ETH) with Lido receive stETH in return. The deposited ether is staked through node operators selected by the Lido DAO, and the rewards accrue to stETH. The Lido DAO is governed by holders of the LDO governance token. The filing described Lido as founded in 2020 by Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov.

Under the plan, the fund would have held stETH directly, tracked its price and accumulated staking rewards. Shares were to be valued against an index calculated by VanEck affiliate MarketVector from prices on the top five stETH trading platforms, and the sponsor fee was to be paid monthly in stETH. Among its risk factors, the filing said the top 100 stETH wallets held about 62.27% of circulating stETH as of Oct. 14, 2025, and that slashing (penalties for validator misbehavior) could reduce the fund's holdings.

Figures published by Lido showed about 9.66 million ETH deposited with the protocol and about 630,000 stETH holder addresses as of late Oct. 15, Korea time. The market value of stETH was about $22.7 billion, and the seven-day average annual reward rate was about 2.23%.

The spot Ether ETF stays, and so does the JitoSOL filing

VanEck already runs a spot ETF that holds ether itself rather than a staking token: the VanEck Ethereum ETF, listed on Cboe BZX under the ticker ETHV. According to the quarterly report it filed with the SEC in August, the fund's net assets stood at $77,828,275 as of June 30, down 50.61% from the end of 2025. The decline was largely driven by ether's 46.50% fall over the period, from $2,971.01 to $1,589.53, while shares outstanding declined from 3,625,000 to 3,350,000.

VanEck has a second application with a similar structure pending: the VanEck JitoSOL ETF, which would hold JitoSOL, a liquid staking token on Solana. It filed an S-1 on Aug. 22, 2025, and an amendment on Oct. 31 that year. No withdrawal request has been filed for that trust, and no new documents have appeared since the amendment.

LDO trades at 508 won on Bithumb, down 8% in a broad sell-off

LDO is not listed on Upbit's Korean won market and trades there only against BTC and USDT. Around 10:30 p.m. KST on Oct. 15, it changed hands at 508 won on South Korean exchange Bithumb, down 8.3% from 24 hours earlier. On Binance it traded at $0.3806 at the same time, down 8.4% on the day.

The wider market was weak. At the same time, ether traded at 3,157,000 won on Upbit, 3.5% below the previous day's close, and at $2,342 on Binance, down 5.7% from 24 hours earlier. The funding rate on Binance's LDO perpetual futures (the periodic payment exchanged between long and short positions) was close to zero at 0.0044%.