Anyone who plays with fire always ends up getting burned. Cboe BZX filed a filing on August 10 demanding authorization to list the very first American ETFs replicating three times the daily performance of Bitcoin and Ether. The SEC published the request on August 14, opening the regulatory clock. After classic Bitcoin ETFs, then double leveraged versions, Wall Street wants to push the cursor even further.
Cboe and Volatility Shares: what the file really predicts
The file, referenced SR-CboeBZX-2026-065, does not only concern crypto. Volatility Shares, the management company behind the request, brings together six funds with 3x leverage: Bitcoin, Ether, gold, silver, oil and natural gas. None of this would hold the underlying asset directly. The funds would be based on futures contracts traded on the CME, supplemented with liquidity as collateral.
Technically, these products do not comply with BZX's generic listing standards, which prohibit leveraged products. Hence the obligation to go through an individual approval procedure (19b-4), with a deadline of 45 days for the SEC, extendable to 90. No launch date has been set, according to The Block.
3x leverage: the mechanic that can turn against you
A 3x leveraged fund aims, every day, to triple the performance of its reference asset. The trap lies in this word: every day. The target resets daily, which means that over several sessions in a row, the actual return can deviate significantly from the promised three times.
This is the compounding effect: a round trip of the market, even moderate, eats into performance with each cycle, a bit like hidden costs that accumulate without being seen. This mechanism is nothing new. It has already been around on leveraged equity ETFs for years. Except that applied to an asset as volatile as Bitcoin, the wear and tear of capital goes significantly faster.
2x leverage on Bitcoin, a sobering precedent
Nothing beats a concrete example. BITX, Volatility Shares' already listed 2x leveraged fund, illustrates the problem well. Its net assets fell from $2.25 billion at the end of March to $1.03 billion at the end of May, according to Yahoo Finance. Over the same period, BITX lost 77.58% when Bitcoin only fell 43.85%: 10,000 dollars invested in August 2025 are only worth 2,242 today. A capital flight described as a “leverage trap” by several analysts: traders who entered at the wrong time saw their position erode even though Bitcoin did not collapse to the same extent. And 7 2x leveraged Bitcoin ETFs already coexist in the US market. The SEC, for its part, has already shown that it is not shy on the subject: it had already approved, from April 2025, an XRP ETF with 2x leverage even before the equivalent spot ETF, an order of priorities which is surprising.
Cboe and Volatility Shares are therefore betting on already familiar ground, but with a notch more. The regulator has 45 to 90 days to rule, and Bitfinex analysts expect a total outstanding amount of more than $400 billion for all crypto ETPs by the end of the year. In this race to increase risk, each new approved product pushes the boundary between traditional asset management and leveraged betting a little further.
