The growth of crypto-focused ETFs is expected to accelerate this year, with one flagship coin seen as the most likely candidate to lead the charge.
“In 2025, a master asset manager will launch a meme coin ETF…Our money is in DOGE,” crypto trading firm Wintermute wrote in a Friday report.
Last year, traditional financial institutions showed notable interest in meme coin trading, with Solana-based tokens. dog hat (Wi-Fi), BONK (BONK), And PONKE (PONKE) driving Wintermute’s over-the-counter (OTC) market share to grow from 0.3% in 2023 to 5.1% in 2024, he writes.
No asset managers have applied for a place yet Dogecoin ETF in the United States, but Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute, confirmed the company’s prediction. He acknowledged, however, that Wintemute’s call was intended to be somewhat ironic.
“Volume ultimately drives interest, which ultimately drives indexing,” he said. “If the meme coin business continues, you can imagine where it’s going, and the most liquid name within that (group) is DOGE.”
Dogecoin was created in 2013 as a joke, parodying the industry with its explicit lack of utility.
Since then, it has been popularized by tech CEO Elon Musk. Meme coins, in general, have become one of the hottest trends in crypto, even though they only trade on vibrations and are as volatile as crypto.
Among traditional financial institutions, OTC spot volumes for meme coins increased by 210% between 2023 and 2024, according to the report. Overall, meme coins have become more popular, accounting for 16% of Wintermute’s OTC volumes in 2024, up from 7% in 2023.
OTC trading desks are typically used by financial institutions looking to execute large trades. In the crypto context, they can often offer traders better prices by operating on multiple exchanges instead of just one platform.
As Ostrovskis described, some of Wintermute’s counterparties come from traditional financial circles. The fragmentation of the crypto market can be a headache, with “so many different tokens and so many different chains,” he said.
Dogecoin and Shiba Inu accounted for 53.6% and 34.6% of Wintermute’s OTC volumes in 2024, respectively, but other coins saw increases in popularity.
Among the most prevalent were Dogwifhat and Pepecoin (PEPE), which saw its volumes increase by 1.4% and 9% respectively.
Nonetheless, Ostrovskis said evolving narratives within crypto could impact OTC volumes, with Wintermute counterparties becoming particularly interested in meme coin trading last March and an “AI angle” towards the end of the year.
“It gets a lot of attention when it’s hot,” he said. “But at the moment it has cooled down a lot.”
Edited by Sébastien Sinclair
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