Bitwise and Superstate Move to Make BSOL the First ETF With Tokenized Shares

One American ETF may soon keep its shareholder register in two places. Bitwise said early on Friday, 14 August, that it will explore tokenizing the shares of its Solana Staking ETF, BSOL, working with Superstate; The Block timestamped its report at 12:09 a.m. EDT, and the announcement also went out through PR Newswire. If it happens, BSOL is expected to become the first US ETF with tokenized shares. Holders would pick the form their stake takes: conventional book-entry at DTC, or tokens recorded on a blockchain. The rights attached are identical either way.

Same share, two ledgers

DTC is the Depository Trust Company, the central depository where nearly every US security sits in book-entry form, meaning ownership lives as an account record instead of a paper certificate. Under the plan, a shareholder could elect to hold BSOL through Superstate's transfer-agency infrastructure instead; a transfer agent is the registrar that keeps the official record of who owns a fund. The tokenized shares come with a hard boundary. They are not freely transferable outside the blockchain-based system, so this is a fund's register moving on-chain, not an ETF share turning into a bearer token that can wander through DeFi.

The word doing the work is explore

Bitwise's language is careful. The release says the firm will "explore" tokenization, adds that "other ETFs may follow," and carries explicit "no assurance" wording. Neither the release nor The Block's report gives a filing timeline or a launch window, and we could not establish which approvals the election would need before opening to holders. The caution has fresh context. Bitwise cut 14% of its staff on 12 August, taking headcount to 155, while managing more than $9 billion across 70-plus products. A firm of that size proposing a first-of-its-kind share structure is news; a date would have been bigger news.

Announced into a regulatory pause

The timing is awkward in one specific way. The SEC had scheduled an open meeting for this same Friday that was expected to take up an innovation exemption for tokenized securities, and it cancelled the session instead. The framework that would govern how tokenized fund shares trade is, for now, undated. Asset managers keep moving anyway. BlackRock put two tokenized funds across three chains at the start of the month, and tokenized real-world assets as a category passed $36.8 billion in early August. Bitwise is proposing something structurally different from both: not a new on-chain fund, but an on-chain form for a fund that already trades on an exchange.

A checkbox, if it clears

The product inside does not change. BSOL keeps doing what a Solana staking ETF does whichever ledger a holder picks, and the identical-rights language means neither form outranks the other. What tokenized shares would change is the plumbing: who keeps the register, and what a shareholder can do with a claim that lives on a chain instead of in a DTC account. What still has to happen is the part the announcement declines to schedule. If the election clears, choosing a ledger becomes a checkbox on a form, and the first US ETF to offer one will be a Solana staking fund. If it does not, BSOL stays an ordinary ETF and the operative word was explore all along.