Late Monday afternoon, someone filed for a Delaware entity called the iShares XRP Trust, a statutory trust whose details were identical to the iShares Ethereum Trust, an entity whose filing came hours before Blackrock and Nasdaq revealed they were applying to launch and make available to the investing public an ethereum ETF.
XRP's price spiked for a hot second, according to CoinGecko, while Crypto Twitter tried to figure out if the application was real. As CoinDesk's Danny Nelson pointed out, XRP is currently the subject of active litigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, suggesting it may be a poor asset for an ETF.
Spoiler alert: It was not a real filing.
"This is false," a BlackRock spokesperson told one of my CoinDesk colleagues.
The thing is, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Longtime CoinDesk readers may recall that in 2021, someone filed to create a pair of Grayscale trust products for the nahmii and theta tokens. The filings were similar to legitimate Grayscale filings but were not filed by the company itself, and were seemingly intended to pump the tokens' prices (Grayscale is a subsidiary of CoinDesk's parent, Digital Currency Group).
Monday's XRP filing may be the result of a similar move. While the Delaware XRP filing was similar to the real iShares Ethereum Trust filing, it was different from the real iShares Bitcoin Trust entity record. The registered agent for the Bitcoin Trust was Wilmington Trust, National Association, while the Ethereum Trust's registered agent was BlackRock Managing Director Daniel Schwieger.
The Delaware Division of Corporations website does not share a whole lot more information than the name of a trust and the registered agent. It does not suggest whether records are screened prior to being posted or if the person submitting the records genuinely represents whatever company they claim to represent.
Members of the public can purchase further information, though interestingly, the website suggested that buying these records would not answer any of those questions.
"If you are requesting the $20 detailed information option, this application will not return actual images of the documents on record. This application will return a page listing the 5 most recent filings, franchise tax assessment, total authorized shares if applicable and tax due. Officer and Director names and addresses are maintained on the images of the annual reports and are not available through this application," the filing said.
I clicked through anyway and discovered that I couldn't pay for the records using a credit card. Instead, I had to input my bank details for a direct ACH debit.
Since the notice on the prior page specified that hitting purchase wouldn't get me the actual records I sought, I chose not to go through with the buy.
Instead, I called the Delaware Division of Corporations and found out that I can place an order for the documents (using credit cards!) on a different page, but will be receiving them via mail.
It's unclear whether there is any way for someone to tell, based on just the immediately-public information available, if a filing is legitimate, which is perhaps why we've now seen this happen twice. | 