Solana ETF Approval: What Happened, and What 9 Funds Really Cost (2026)

Solana ETF approval is not pending. It happened, and the mechanism was not the one most pages are still waiting for: the SEC never issued a Solana-specific approval order at all. On 17 September 2025 it approved generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares, and after that an exchange could list a spot Solana fund without asking the Commission at all. Nine US Solana funds have registered their shares for listing since. Eight of them have filed quarterly reports.

That matters because the pages ranking for this question are still arguing about odds. One quotes a prediction market at 76% for 31 July 2025. One asks whether the SEC "may approve as early as July". One is a Reddit thread about a bot that watches for "Effective" status changes. They are all answering a question the record closed a year ago, and none of them tells you the thing you would actually want before buying: what these funds charge and what they have done.

So this article reads the filings instead. Every ticker, listing date, fee and asset figure below comes from EDGAR — the funds' own Form 8-A12B registrations, 10-Q reports for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, and prospectus supplements. The on-chain comparison numbers come from four unauthenticated RPC calls made on 6 October 2026, which you can re-run. Where a figure is derived rather than filed, it says so.

There was no Solana approval order. There was a rule change that made one unnecessary.

Until September 2025, listing a spot crypto ETP required the exchange to file a proposed rule change under Section 19(b) of the Exchange Act and wait for the SEC to approve that specific product. That is the process that produced the Bitcoin approvals in January 2024 and the Ether approvals that May, and it is the process everyone assumed Solana would have to go through.

Instead, Nasdaq, Cboe BZX and NYSE Arca each filed to adopt generic listing standards, and the SEC approved all three on an accelerated basis in a single order — Release No. 34-103995, issued 17 September 2025, published in the Federal Register on 22 September. NYSE Arca's version is new Rule 8.201-E (Generic); it was originally filed on 30 July 2025 and amended on 4 September. The effect of the order is that an exchange may list commodity-based trust shares under Rule 19b-4(e) without a separate product-by-product approval.

The qualifying test is what let Solana through. Under the standards, the underlying commodity must have been the subject of a futures contract trading for at least six months on a CFTC-regulated designated contract market, and the listing exchange must have a comprehensive surveillance sharing agreement with that market, directly or through common membership in the Intermarket Surveillance Group. Once SOL futures had six months of history on a regulated venue, the gate opened on its own.

You do not have to take that from a news report. Grayscale's own 10-Q describes it in one sentence: "On October 28, 2025, in connection with the approval of application under the Generic Listing Standards and the effectiveness of the registration statement on Form S-1, the Sponsor authorized the commencement of a redemption program." Its shares began trading on NYSE Arca the next day.

So the honest status, as of 6 October 2026: nothing is awaiting approval. What remains is the ordinary registration process — a fund files an S-1, the SEC declares it effective, the exchange lists it. Morgan Stanley's Solana trust went effective on 23 July 2026 under exactly that path.

Nine Solana trusts have filed Form 8-A12B to register shares for exchange listing. Tickers and exchanges below are from the SEC's own submissions records; listing dates and fees are quoted from each fund's 10-Q or 10-K; net assets and NAV per share are as reported for 30 June 2026.

Ticker	Fund	Listed	Sponsor fee	Cut of staking rewards	Net assets 30 Jun 2026
BSOL	Bitwise Solana Staking ETF	28 Oct 2025	0.20%	not stated as a rate	$592.3M
FSOL	Fidelity Solana Fund	18 Nov 2025	0.25%	15%	$127.1M
GSOL	Grayscale Solana Staking ETF	29 Oct 2025	0.19% (was 0.35%)	7% (was 23%)	$101.2M
VSOL	VanEck Solana ETF	17 Nov 2025	0.30%	charged outside the fee	$14.3M
SOEZ	Franklin Solana Trust	3 Dec 2025	0.19%	8.0%	$8.5M
QSOL	Invesco Galaxy Solana ETF	15 Dec 2025	0.25%	3%	$5.1M
TSOL	21Shares Solana Staking ETF	19 Nov 2025	0.21%	10%	$2.8M
SOLC	Canary Marinade Solana ETF	18 Nov 2025	0.50%	validator fees, netted	$1.5M
MSOL	Morgan Stanley Solana Trust	effective 23 Jul 2026	0.14%	5%	no report filed yet

Three things in that table are worth saying out loud.

The category is one fund. The eight that have reported held $852.8 million between them at 30 June 2026, and Bitwise's BSOL was $592.3 million of it — 69.5%. Add Fidelity and two funds are 84% of the category. The bottom four — Franklin, Invesco, 21Shares and Canary — are $17.9 million combined, about 2.1%. "Which Solana ETF is best?" is a popular question with a boring answer: most of them have barely been bought.

GSOL is older than it looks. Grayscale's 10-Q reports that the trust "commenced operations on November 18, 2021" as a private placement vehicle; it uplisted to NYSE Arca on 29 October 2025. Its NAV history therefore runs back four years, which no other fund in the table can say.

The headline fees are converging downward and are not the whole cost. Morgan Stanley came in at 0.14%, below everyone. Grayscale cut from 0.35% to 0.19%. 21Shares agreed to waive its sponsor fee entirely for a year from 28 July 2026. That looks like a price war, and in the advertised number it is. The unadvertised number went the other way.

Six of the nine funds stake some or all of their SOL, and every one of them takes a percentage of the staking rewards before passing the rest to shareholders. This is a second fee, it is separate from the expense ratio you see quoted, and at the two largest staking funds it is the bigger of the two.

Bitwise states it plainly in the footnotes to BSOL's financial highlights: the gross and net expense ratios for the six months to 30 June 2026 "include staking fees of 0.38%", and "would have been 0.20% and 0.16%, respectively, without the staking fees". For the second quarter alone the staking fees were 0.36% and the ratios would have been 0.18% without them. So at the largest Solana ETF in the United States, the fee that is not in the marketing is twice the fee that is.

The dollar split says the same thing. Here is each staking fund's second-quarter 2026 expense breakdown, exactly as reported:

Fund	Sponsor fee, Q2 2026	Staking fee, Q2 2026	Staking fee as share of total expenses
BSOL (Bitwise)	$307,000	$555,000	64%
GSOL (Grayscale)	$88,440	$306,301	78%
TSOL (21Shares)	$1,503	$1,810	55%

Grayscale is the clearest case because it repriced both fees at once. Its prospectus supplement of 25 June 2026 reduced the Sponsor's Fee from 0.35% to 0.19% and the Sponsor's Staking Fee from 23% to 7% of gross staking rewards, in the same two sentences. Almost every write-up of that event reported the first number. The second one was more than three times as large in dollar terms over the preceding quarter.

Across the nine funds the published cut of staking rewards ranges from 3% at Invesco's QSOL to 15% at Fidelity's FSOL, with Morgan Stanley at 5%, Grayscale now at 7%, Franklin at 8% and 21Shares at 10%. That is a five-fold spread in a charge that appears in no fund's name, no ticker page and almost no article. Two funds do not publish a percentage at all: Bitwise does not state a rate in its 10-Q (you have to back it out of the expense ratio footnote), and VanEck's unified 0.30% fee explicitly excludes the "Custodian Staking Facilitation Fee", which is treated as an extraordinary expense borne by the trust.

Fidelity deserves credit here, because it publishes the one table that makes the whole thing legible. FSOL's 10-Q discloses, month by month, the share of the fund that was staked and the gross and net staking reward rates:

Month end, 2026	Share of fund staked	Gross reward rate	Net reward rate
31 January	72.50%	4.49%	4.49%
28 February	72.59%	5.02%	5.02%
31 March	72.00%	5.27%	5.27%
30 April	72.57%	4.97%	4.97%
31 May	72.41%	4.39%	4.12%
30 June	99.64%	6.22%	5.27%

Read the last two rows together with the waiver dates and the mechanism is visible in the open. Fidelity waived the staking fee entirely until 18 May 2026 and began accruing it on 19 May — which is exactly when the gross and net columns separate. In June the fund earned 6.22% gross and passed on 5.27%, a haircut of 95 basis points, or 15.3% of the gross reward. The prospectus says the sponsor takes "a staking fee equal to 15% of the amount of staking rewards received". The arithmetic and the disclosure agree to a rounding error, which is the nice thing about reading filings instead of press releases.

The staked-share column is the other half of the story. For five of six months only about 72% of Fidelity's fund was staked, and 21Shares reports something starker: 90.80% of its SOL was staked at 30 June 2026, but it "staked an average of 43.15% of its solana holdings on a daily basis" over the quarter. A fund with "Staking" in its name had under half its assets earning rewards for most of the period. None of this is hidden — it is simply only written down in a 10-Q. Franklin, for contrast, reports 99.88% and 99.98% staked at its two measurement dates.

The NAV per share of each fund is filed quarterly, so the record is unambiguous. These are reported figures, in dollars per share:

Fund	First reported	31 Dec 2025	31 Mar 2026	30 Jun 2026
BSOL	$25.00 (seed)	$16.37	$11.07	$10.01
VSOL	$25.00 (seed)	$16.23	$11.01	$10.05
FSOL	$15.21 (16 Nov 2025)	$14.66	$9.84	$8.87
GSOL	$15.17 (30 Sep 2025)	$9.09	$6.14	$5.54

BSOL and VSOL were both seeded at $25.00 a share and both reported almost exactly $10 nine months later — declines of 60.0% and 59.8% from the seed price. The cause is not the funds. VanEck's 10-Q states it directly: SOL fell from $124.73 on 31 December 2025 to $75.29 on 30 June 2026, down 39.6%, and its NAV fell 39.2% over the same window. The funds tracked the asset, which is their job.

The point is what that does to the fee discussion. A staking ETF's reward rate of roughly 5% gross, minus a 15% cut of it, minus a 0.25% sponsor fee, is a rounding error against a 40% move in the underlying. If you are buying a Solana ETF, you are buying the price of SOL and very little else, and the thing to compare is not one fund's 0.19% against another's 0.25%. It is whether price exposure is what you actually wanted.

Solana's staking yield is not a matter of opinion — it falls out of two numbers the chain publishes. We queried mainnet-beta on 6 October 2026, at epoch 1050:

curl -s https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"getInflationRate"}'
# total 0.03615736  (3.6157%), all of it to validators

# getSupply  -> total 635,304,707 SOL
# getVoteAccounts -> 441,738,541 SOL staked across 672 active validators

Staked SOL is 69.53% of total supply, so the gross staking rate is 3.6157% ÷ 0.6953 = 5.200% a year. That is the whole pie, before anyone takes a cut.

From there the comparison is arithmetic. A fund charging a 0.25% sponsor fee and 15% of rewards nets you about 4.17% on the staked portion, and if only 72% of the fund is staked you are earning that on less than three-quarters of your money. Staking directly, you choose the validator — and 229 of the 672 active validators ran 0% commission on the day we checked, with a median commission of 5%. The stake-weighted average commission is 26.55%, which tells you the large validators charge considerably more than the median, so the choice matters.

One widely repeated detail is worth correcting, and it appears in a fund's own filing. VanEck's 10-Q says staked SOL "will be inaccessible for approximately two to three days". Deactivating a stake takes effect at the next epoch boundary, so the real worst case is one epoch. We measured the last two from block timestamps: epoch 1049 ran 115,585 seconds — 32.11 hours, and epoch 1048 ran 115,449 seconds, or 32.07 hours. That is about 267.6 milliseconds a slot. The "two to three days" figure is conservative rather than wrong, but it is roughly double the measured wait, and the same number circulates as fact in guides to Solana staking, Marinade and Sanctum.

If liquidity during the unbonding window is the thing you care about, liquid staking tokens already solve it without a brokerage account, and we have compared the trade-offs in those two reviews. If low Solana transaction fees and fast settlement are what drew you to the chain, note that neither reaches you through an ETF wrapper at all.

Everything above is a public record, and the lookup takes about ten minutes. This is the method, so you can date-check it yourself rather than trusting this page in six months.

• Find the funds. EDGAR full-text search for "Solana" restricted to form 8-A12B returns every trust that has registered shares for exchange listing, with the filing date. That is how the nine in the table were identified.
• Confirm ticker and exchange. data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK<10-digit-cik>.json returns the fund's current name, tickers and exchanges. This is also how you catch renames — Grayscale's and 21Shares' funds both added "Staking" to their names after their initial registrations.
• Get the money. These are not 1940-Act funds, so they file 10-Q and 10-K reports like operating companies. data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK<cik>.json returns every tagged figure, including AssetsNet, NetAssetValuePerShare and SponsorFees, with the period each belongs to.
• Find the staking fee. It is in the 10-Q notes, not the fee page. Search the filing text for "Staking Fee" and for the phrase "of the staking rewards". Fee changes arrive as 424B3 prospectus supplements — Grayscale's cut is a single two-page document.
• Check the chain. getInflationRate, getSupply and getVoteAccounts against the public mainnet RPC need no key and give you the staking rate and every validator's commission.

Set a User-Agent header on the SEC requests or they will be refused. That is the only trick.

A spot Solana ETF does one thing well: it puts SOL price exposure in a brokerage or retirement account, with a custodian and an auditor and a 10-Q. For a lot of people that is the right answer, and nothing below argues otherwise.

But it is worth being clear about what the wrapper gives up, because the funds are sold on the convenience and rarely on the constraint.

• You own shares, not SOL. You cannot swap, provide liquidity, or interact with anything on Solana. A Solana wallet and an ETF are not substitutes.
• It trades when the stock market is open. Solana does not close. Weekend and overnight moves arrive as a gap in the share price.
• It cannot follow a trader. An ETF holds one asset by rule. It cannot rotate, cannot size positions, and cannot mirror anybody's decisions — which is the entire mechanism behind crypto copy trading.
• Someone else picks the validators. You inherit the sponsor's staking arrangements, its cut of the rewards, and its decision about how much of the fund to stake at all — 43% on average, in 21Shares' case.

That last cluster is the honest dividing line. An ETF is a bet that SOL goes up. If what you actually want is exposure to how specific people trade on Solana, the wrapper cannot deliver it at any fee. That is the gap uwuu fills: you keep your own keys, pick a trader from a verified on-chain leaderboard, and their trades are mirrored in your own wallet in under 400 milliseconds. The fee is performance-based — you pay when you profit, and not otherwise, which is a different shape from a sponsor fee that accrues daily whether SOL is at $125 or $75.

It is also a different risk. Copy trading can lose money faster than an index fund, and whether copy trading is profitable depends entirely on who you copy. We have written about the risks at length and would rather you read that before the marketing. The comparison worth making is not ETF versus copy trading on fees; it is passive price exposure versus active exposure, chosen deliberately.

Has the SEC approved a Solana ETF?

Not in the form most people are looking for. The SEC approved generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares on 17 September 2025 (Release No. 34-103995), which lets Nasdaq, Cboe BZX and NYSE Arca list spot crypto funds under Rule 19b-4(e) without a product-specific approval order. Nine US Solana trusts have registered shares for listing since, and eight were trading and filing quarterly reports as of 30 June 2026.

What is the Solana ETF ticker?

There are nine, not one. BSOL (Bitwise), FSOL (Fidelity), GSOL (Grayscale), VSOL (VanEck), SOEZ (Franklin), QSOL (Invesco Galaxy), TSOL (21Shares), SOLC (Canary Marinade) and MSOL (Morgan Stanley). BSOL is by far the largest, at 69.5% of the category's $852.8 million of net assets at 30 June 2026.

Which Solana ETF has the lowest fee?

On the advertised sponsor fee, Morgan Stanley's MSOL at 0.14%, ahead of Franklin's SOEZ and Grayscale's GSOL at 0.19%. But the staking funds also take a cut of staking rewards — 3% at Invesco, 5% at Morgan Stanley, 7% at Grayscale, 8% at Franklin, 10% at 21Shares and 15% at Fidelity. At Bitwise's BSOL that second charge cost 0.36% of assets in the second quarter of 2026 against a 0.18% expense ratio without it, so comparing sponsor fees alone is misleading.

Do Solana ETFs pay staking rewards?

Six of the nine stake, and they retain or distribute the rewards net of a staking fee. How much reaches you depends on two things the funds disclose only in their 10-Qs: the cut taken, and the share of the fund actually staked. Fidelity reported about 72% staked for five months of the first half of 2026, and 21Shares averaged 43.15% staked during the second quarter despite being 90.80% staked on the final day.

Is a Solana ETF better than staking SOL yourself?

They are different products. Direct staking paid roughly 5.20% gross on 6 October 2026 (3.6157% inflation divided by a 69.53% staked share), and you can pick from 229 validators charging 0% commission. An ETF hands the validator choice, the reward split and the staked percentage to the sponsor, and in exchange gives you brokerage custody and a 10-Q. The ETF is simpler; it is not cheaper.

How long does it take to unstake SOL?

At most one epoch, because deactivation takes effect at the next epoch boundary. We measured epoch 1049 at 115,585 seconds — 32.11 hours — from block timestamps on 6 October 2026, and epoch 1048 at 32.07 hours. The "two to three days" figure that appears in many guides, and in VanEck's own 10-Q, is roughly double the current measured wait.

Can a Solana ETF copy a trader's positions?

No. A spot ETF holds one asset by mandate; it cannot rotate between tokens or mirror anyone's trades. Following a specific trader requires a non-custodial tool that signs trades in your own wallet, which is a different product with a different risk profile — see how to copy trade on Solana and the best Solana trading bots for how that works.