SEC Approves ETF Listing Amendment Allowing 15% JitoSOL Allocation in Commodity Trusts

The SEC completed amendments to the generic listing standards for Commodity-Based Trust Shares on all three major US listing exchanges last week, opening a direct allocation slot for liquid staking tokens inside US-registered exchange-traded products. Any product already listed under those standards can now hold up to 15% of its net asset value in qualifying "digital commodities" with no product-specific rule filing required. Jito JTO$0.482-7.9% published a legal analysis on August 6 arguing that JitoSOL meets the new standard directly.

The amendments were approved July 27 for Nasdaq and July 28 for NYSE Arca, with the SEC granting accelerated approval to Cboe BZX on August 3. All three major listing exchanges now operate under the same amended standard.

What the 15% Digital Commodity Buffer Adds

Under the previous framework, a Commodity-Based Trust Share could only hold assets that independently cleared the full eligibility bar: the underlying asset had to trade on an Intermarket Surveillance Group member market, underlie a CFTC-regulated futures contract, or be tracked by a qualifying existing ETF. There was no partial-allocation path for assets that did not meet those criteria.

The amendments introduce a 15% buffer. A trust may now devote up to that share of NAV to a "digital commodity" as defined in the SEC and CFTC's March 23, 2026 joint interpretive guidance: an asset whose value derives from the programmatic operation of a functional crypto system and from supply and demand, rather than from the managerial efforts of others. The remaining 85% of NAV must still satisfy the original requirements.

For Solana spot ETPs already operating under the generic standards, the consequence is immediate: sponsors can allocate up to 15% to JitoSOL today, under the listing rules already in place, without a product-specific rule filing. That removes the main procedural barrier that made yield-bearing positions inside commodity trusts effectively unavailable since Solana spot ETFs launched.

How JitoSOL Meets the Digital Commodity Definition

The Jito Foundation's August 6 analysis maps JitoSOL against the definition field by field.

JitoSOL's value has two inputs: the market price of SOL and the rewards accrued to the staked position in the Jito Stake Pool. Both are outputs of the Solana network protocol. Validator selection inside the pool runs through StakeNet, open-source code deployed on-chain that scores validators on objective, observable performance metrics and rebalances stake across roughly 250 of them on a fixed schedule. Changes to that code require an on-chain vote of the Jito DAO, whose JTO governance token is distributed across roughly 63,000 wallets. Neither Jito Labs nor the Jito Foundation has voted its JTO.

That structure is what the "managerial efforts" test targets. The March 2026 interpretation describes staking receipt tokens as assets evidencing a depositor's ownership of the deposited digital commodity and the rewards that accrue to it, and concludes that generating, issuing, and redeeming such tokens does not involve offering or selling a security. A receipt for a non-security digital commodity is not itself a security.

The Foundation also addresses the objection that a digital commodity cannot generate yield. The March 2026 interpretation names SOL and ether as digital commodities and lists staking among the technical rights those assets convey. Staked SOL accrues rewards programmatically. If accrual alone disqualified an asset, the interpretation's own examples would fail its own definition. Staking rewards are algorithmic network payments with no guarantor, not income from a business enterprise.

JitoSOL's Track Record Inside a US ETP

JitoSOL has already spent a year inside a US-listed fund. REX-Osprey added JitoSOL to the REX-Osprey SOL + Staking ETF (Cboe BZX: SSK) in July 2025, carrying an allocation of approximately 5% of net assets through a full year of Solana market conditions. SSK is a registered fund under the Investment Company Act of 1940, not a Commodity-Based Trust Share, so the generic listing standard amendments do not apply to it directly. The Jito Foundation draws no precedent from it for the GLS Amendments specifically, but it established that JitoSOL can be acquired, custodied, valued daily, and reported inside a compliant US product. Anchorage Digital and BitGo currently provide institutional custody with full mint-and-redeem capability.

Austin Campbell's September 2025 analysis of JitoSOL's price behavior, cited by the Foundation, measured hourly correlation with SOL of approximately 0.9979 on OKX and 0.9985 on Coinbase, with a small basis consistent with continuous arbitrage between the mint-and-redeem path and secondary markets.

As of August 6, JitoSOL carries a market cap of approximately $721 million and roughly 189,813 holding wallets, according to Solana Compass data.

What Issuers Can Act On Now

The Jito Foundation's note to sponsors is direct: any issuer operating a Solana Commodity-Based Trust Share under the amended standards already holds 15% capacity for JitoSOL, with no additional rulemaking required. The Foundation published objective, technology-neutral criteria for evaluating staking receipt tokens, covering legal characterization, asset-level standards around bridge risk and price equivalence to the underlying, and operational requirements including open-source audited contracts, algorithmic validator delegation, and a verified reward distribution history. JitoSOL meets all of them, it states.

The Foundation also makes a capital efficiency argument for an SRT structure over direct staking inside a trust. A sponsor holding JitoSOL does not need to maintain an unstaked buffer or arrange credit facilities to fund redemptions during the unbonding period, because the token itself offers liquidity through secondary markets and on-chain redemption paths. Direct staking requires holding some portion of assets undeployed at all times, a cost that lands on fund shareholders.

The VanEck JitoSOL ETF S-1, filed in August 2025, is the first attempt to build a product entirely around JitoSOL and remains under SEC review. The generic listing standard amendments do not resolve that filing, which requires its own approval. They open a separate path: adding a JitoSOL sleeve to an existing Solana spot ETP without a new rule filing. For more background on the VanEck filing and the structure of a JitoSOL ETF, see Solana Compass's analysis of the S-1.

JitoSOL's institutional traction has accelerated in recent weeks. Coinbase began accepting JitoSOL as USDC loan collateral on July 25, and South Korean prime broker Wavebridge signed a memorandum of understanding with the Jito Foundation on July 27 to develop jitoSOL institutional products for the Korean regulated market.