VanEck Seeks to Withdraw Lido Staked Ethereum ETF Filing

VanEck filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 14 to withdraw the registration statement for its proposed Lido Staked Ethereum ETF, shelving a planned brokerage-account route to stETH exposure before any shares were issued or sold.

In its Form RW withdrawal request, sponsor VanEck Digital Assets said it “does not intend to proceed with the planned distribution” of the fund’s shares. It asked the SEC to consent to withdrawing the Form S-1 registration statement originally filed on Oct. 16, 2025.

VanEck confirmed that the registration statement had never been declared effective and that no securities had been or would be issued or sold under it. The letter gives no further explanation for the decision. The move cancels a proposed offering rather than closing a fund that investors already hold.

A Planned Brokerage Wrapper for stETH

The original prospectus proposed holding stETH directly and tracking its price, less the fund’s operating expenses. Investors would have bought and sold shares through brokers instead of acquiring and holding the token themselves.

Lido’s stETH represents deposited ether and the staking rewards earned on it. Those rewards accrue through a rebasing mechanism: a holder’s stETH balance increases to reflect earned rewards. The proposed fund would have put that liquid-staking exposure inside an exchange-traded vehicle.

The withdrawal does not eliminate U.S. brokerage access to ether staking. For example, the Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF, or ETHE, trades on NYSE Arca and stakes a portion of its ether holdings. Its underlying asset is ether, however, rather than the stETH token VanEck’s fund proposed holding.

The decision also follows recent SEC staff guidance explaining how qualifying staking receipt tokens can fall into digital-tool or digital-commodity categories, as The Defiant reported. Those FAQs are nonbinding staff views, not a Commission rule or approval of an ETF.