Institutionalise spot digital asset ETFs step by step
Start with regulated price exposure, then settle who prices, who holds and who creates and redeems, before adding staking.
- To
- Financial Services Commission; Financial Supervisory Service; Korea Exchange
- From
- Im Seung-jin, Researcher, FnGuide
- Date
- 2026.09.10
- Occasion
- Digital Asset Finance Innovation seminar, Post Tower, Seoul, 10 Sep 2026 (hosted by Reps. Min Byung-deok and Ahn Do-geol, organised by KORFIN)
2026.09.10
What we ask
- Begin with price exposure through ordinary brokerage accounts, as the US did with futures ETFs before spot.
- Assign clear roles for index calculation, custody and creation and redemption before approving spot products.
- Build a separate risk framework before allowing liquid staking tokens inside ETFs.
Digital asset ETFs have moved beyond tracking a single price. Products now hold baskets of assets, stake them, and use liquid staking tokens so that locked assets stay redeemable while rewards accrue to net asset value.
The US sequence is instructive. Bitcoin futures ETFs came first. Spot ETFs followed only after regulators had tested surveillance for price manipulation and the correlation between spot and futures prices. Reliable reference prices and market surveillance became the core of investor protection.
New risks need their own rules
Liquid staking tokens can make redemptions easier, but they bring validator selection and concentration risk, gaps between market and redemption prices, oracle errors, and smart contract and governance risk. These need a dedicated assessment framework.
Institutionalising spot ETFs in Korea is not one approval. It is work across three layers, legislation, regulation and market infrastructure, and it comes down to deciding who calculates prices, who holds the assets and who creates and redeems units.
Adapted from eToday: 김효봉 변호사 “규제 명확성 위해 업계 전문성 활용한 법적 근거 마련 필요” (Korean).