In Brief:
- Grayscale filed an S-1 with the SEC on Monday for the first US exchange-traded fund tied to Worldcoin's WLD token.
- The fund would trade on Nasdaq as GWLD, hold WLD directly and track the CoinDesk Worldcoin Benchmark Rate, less expenses.
- Key terms including the management fee and seed capital were left blank, and the filing doesn’t guarantee approval.
Grayscale filed an S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday to launch the first US exchange-traded fund tied to Worldcoin’s WLD token.
The proposed Grayscale Worldcoin ETF would list on Nasdaq under the ticker GWLD. It would hold WLD directly and track the token’s price using the CoinDesk Worldcoin Benchmark Rate, less expenses.
Grayscale Files First Worldcoin ETF With SEC
Grayscale has filed with the SEC to launch the first ETF tied to Worldcoin's $WLD token in the United States.
The proposed fund would passively hold WLD and track its market price, less expenses, according to the filing.
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The fund is passive. It won’t use leverage, derivatives or any active strategy, according to the filing. Grayscale said it plans to offer in-kind creations and redemptions.
A fast filing
Grayscale moved quickly. It formed the trust on July 10 and filed the registration 10 days later.
The firm wants to list under Nasdaq’s generic listing standards for commodity-based trusts, a route that lets crypto ETFs launch without a separate approval process.
BitGo Bank & Trust would custody the WLD. BNY Mellon would serve as administrator and transfer agent, and CSC Delaware Trust Company would act as trustee.
Blank fields
Several terms are missing. Grayscale hasn’t disclosed the management fee, the seed investment, the authorized participants or the amount of WLD represented by each share. Those fields were left blank and are expected to be filled in through later amendments.
An S-1 is an early-stage filing. It doesn’t guarantee the SEC will approve the product or that the fund will ever trade.
WLD’s numbers
WLD rose as much as 8% over 24 hours after the filing, reaching an intraday high of $0.387. It stayed down for the week and sits about 97% below its record.
As of June 30, WLD had a circulating supply of about 3.5 billion tokens and an aggregate market value of roughly $1.4 billion, the filing said. Its 24-hour trading volume was about $135.1 million. The filing ranked WLD the 41st largest digital asset by market cap, citing CoinMarketCap. The Block’s data put the token lower, at $1.3 billion and 57th.
Grayscale’s ETF push
The filing continues Grayscale’s expansion into single-asset crypto funds. The firm converted its Bitcoin (official site) trust into an ETF after winning a court fight with the SEC, then launched an Ethereum fund.
It has since filed for or rolled out products tied to XRP, Dogecoin, Solana (official site), Chainlink, Litecoin and Avalanche.
The token
WLD is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum and the native token of World Network, the digital identity project built by Tools for Humanity. Sam Altman and Alex Blania founded the company.
World pairs its World ID proof-of-personhood system with World Chain, the World App and the iris-scanning Orb, which issues IDs and distributes WLD to verified humans.
Grayscale flagged the network’s reliance on biometric data as one of the product’s principal risks. World has drawn regulatory scrutiny and privacy complaints in several jurisdictions over how it collects and handles that data.
