Blackrock Files S-1 For Staked ETH ETF

Plus: 🏛️ CFTC greenlights crypto as derivatives collateral, 📊 Paradigm flags Polymarket volume double counting, 🧾 SEC ends probe into Ondo Finance.

Author

Juan Aranovich
December 09, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🟣 BlackRock files S-1 for a staked ETH ETF

  • 🏛️ CFTC launches pilot program allowing BTC, ETH, and USDC as collateral

  • 📊 Paradigm says Polymarket trading volume has been double counted

  • 🧾 SEC closes its two year investigation into Ondo Finance

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By Tikta

BlackRock Files S-1 for Staked ETH ETF

Asset manager BlackRock has officially filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the iShares Staked Ethereum ETF.

The fund will trade under the ticker ETHB and plans to stake between 70% to 90% of its holdings under normal conditions, mirroring ETH price movements while distributing yields quarterly after fees.

Shares would trade on Nasdaq, with creation and redemption limited to authorized participants in 40,000-share blocks.

The new product would also remain separate from BlackRock's existing iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA), which holds about $11 billion in ETH.

The filing comes at a time when staked ETH already sits near an all-time high, while ETH on centralized exchanges reached near-record lows.

Data from a Dune dashboard compiled by @hildobby shows that $108 billion worth of ETH has been staked, amounting to 28.08% of total supply. 

Unchained On Air for Dec. 9 features martinis & markets 🍸️ 📈

Tune in at 12pm ET to hear from the brilliant legal minds behind DEX in the City (Jessi Brooks, Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos, and Vy Le) as they discuss Citadel, CFTC/Bitnomial, and AI/anthropic smart contracts.

Then at 1:00pm ET, Laura gets a market update from Arca’s David Nage and Bitwise’s Ryan Rasmussen.

📺️ Where to watch it LIVE: YouTube, X, PumpFun, or Twitch

CFTC’s New Pilot Allows BTC, ETH and USDC as Derivatives Collateral

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) launched a pilot program on Monday allowing bitcoin, ether, and USDC to serve as margin collateral for futures commission merchants (FCMs) in regulated derivatives markets.

Acting Chairman Caroline Pham announced the initiative, which includes strict weekly reporting on customer holdings, immediate issue notifications, and enhanced CFTC oversight to protect assets.

It withdraws the 2020 Staff Advisory 20-34, enabling tokenized assets amid advancements from the GENIUS Act.

“Our new guidance will enable tokenized markets, and we’re cutting red tape that is outdated,” said Pham. 

Pham believes the move would boost capital efficiency, enable instant onchain settlement, and position U.S. markets as a safer alternative to offshore platforms.

Paradigm Claims Polymarket Trading Figures Are Double Counted

Storm Slivkoff, Research Partner at crypto venture firm Paradigm, claims to have found a “pretty major data bug” with respect to platforms tracking Polymarket’s volume metrics.

Slivkoff suggested that most dashboards tracking Polymarket's trading volume have been double-counting it due to redundant onchain data structures in Polymarket's smart contracts.

“The core issue = Polymarket emits separate OrderFilled events for the maker and taker of each trade,” said Slivkoff, highlighting an example where a single trade of $4.13 contains two OrderFilled events, causing most dashboards to report it as $8.26 in volume.

Paradigm said it has validated the information with dashboard creators and been in touch with several data platforms, including DeFiLlama and Blockworks to get rid of the double counting.

As of late Monday evening, data compiled by Varrock founder Richard Chen showed Polymarket’s November monthly volume hit $3.7 billion, while DeFiLlama’s dashboard showed a much lower figure of $1.87 billion. 

SEC Drops Biden-Era Investigation Into Ondo Finance

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has closed a two-year confidential investigation into tokenization platform Ondo Finance without charges, the firm disclosed in a statement on Monday.

“The inquiries were broad, touching almost every aspect of our business, and cost millions of dollars in legal and huge amounts of time to respond to,” said Ondo CEO Nathan Allman on X.

 One of the areas of focus for the SEC was around whether Ondo’s native token ONDO was a security — a common allegation in SEC enforcement actions when Gary Gensler was still Chairman.

ONDO’s native token rallied 8% to an intraday high of $0.50 after the firm shared news of the case being closed.

Ondo has over $1.8 billion in total value locked on its platform, with token holders’ annual net income sitting at $6.93 million. The firm plans to share the next phase of its roadmap at its New York summit in February.

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  • 🔗 Bitfinex-backed Stable launched its StableChain mainnet along with its STABLE token and a new governing foundation, aiming to build a payments-focused blockchain where everyday transactions run on Tether’s USDT as the gas currency.

  • 📉🧩 Solana’s active validators dropped from above 2,500 in early 2023 to roughly 800 today, a decline some frame as healthy removal of fake or redundant nodes while others warn it reflects real operators quitting due to rising costs, leaving decentralization dependent on how much stake is still spread across independent participants.

  • 📡 Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum finally corrected what he long saw as a major weakness—its neglect of peer-to-peer networking—crediting the new PeerDAS system and its engineers for proving the network can now push toward faster block spreading, stronger reliability, and better privacy protections.

  • 🍌⚠️ Binance suspended an employee after discovering they allegedly used official company channels to hype a newly created “year of the yellow fruit” token seconds after it appeared onchain, a move the exchange said violated internal rules and may lead to legal action—ironically fueling an even larger price spike as traders piled in after the scandal went public.

  • 🏛️ Senator Bernie Moreno said negotiations over the long-awaited U.S. crypto market structure bill have dragged on, arguing that he would rather pass nothing than approve a flawed law as Republicans and Democrats try to reconcile differences over agency powers, consumer protections, and definitions for assets that should not be treated as securities.

  • 📄 The UK’s financial regulator plans to overhaul its investment rules by replacing the dense Key Information Document with a simpler “product summary” and by giving wealthier or professional investors wider flexibility to access complex products that ordinary consumers face limits on.

  • 🌎 Paradigm invested $13.5 million into Brazil-based Crown at a $90 million valuation, backing the startup’s rapidly growing BRLV token — a stablecoin fully backed by Brazilian government bonds that Crown claims has already become the largest stablecoin in emerging markets.

  • 💰 BitMine boosted its crypto reserves to 3.86 million ETH after buying 138,452 ETH in a week, giving the little-known mining-and-infrastructure firm a total asset pile of $13.2 billion that also includes cash, bitcoin and speculative equity bets.