[Digital Today reporter Yoonseo Lee (이윤서)] Asset manager Grayscale has filed an amended application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to convert its Litecoin trust, LTCN, into a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF).

On Sept. 14, blockchain media outlet CoinPost reported that if approval and listing take place, the product would be renamed the Grayscale Litecoin Trust ETF and would seek a listing on NYSE Arca.

LTCN is still issued only through private placements, and it trades in the over-the-counter market under the ticker LTCN. Grayscale also filed a similar S-3 in September 2025, but the SEC has not yet declared it effective. As a result, the structural conversion from a trust to an ETF has not been completed.

The issue is the size of its assets. The trust's net asset value (NAV) fell to about $82.3 million at the end of June 2026 from about $175.9 million at the end of June 2025, reflecting a decline in the Litecoin price. NAV per share also shrank to about $3.39 from about $7.25.

The market price is also below NAV. LTCN closed at $4.01 on Sept. 9 and traded at an 8 percent discount to NAV. The trust currently does not run a redemption programme, so the arbitrage mechanism that narrows the gap between share supply and demand and the underlying asset price is not operating. Whether an ETF conversion would ease this structural discount will be watched.

The listing process is not yet complete. NYSE Arca submitted a proposed 19b-4 rule change to the SEC on Jan. 24, 2025 that would allow the listing. New general listing standards introduced later have effectively weakened the meaning of the review deadline at the time, and no official announcement has been made as of September 2026. A Bloomberg analyst estimates the chance of approval at 100 percent based on listing standards from late September 2025.

Competing products have already been listed first. Canary Capital's spot Litecoin ETF, LTCC, was listed on Oct. 28, 2025. In September that year, spot XRP and Dogecoin ETFs came to market first, and spot XRP and Solana ETFs are already in operation. Bitwise's spot Dogecoin ETF also received NYSE Arca listing approval in November 2025, but ended operations in September 2026.

Against this backdrop, Grayscale's conversion of its spot Litecoin product into an ETF has the hallmarks of a latecomer. Even if it changes the structure from a trust to an ETF, it would still be entering the market later than rivals.

As a result, the key to this filing lies less in approval itself and more in how much LTCN, which has remained in an over-the-counter trust structure, can ease price dislocations and liquidity problems by switching to an ETF format. The next points to watch are what conclusion the SEC reaches under the new listing standards, and whether it can attract actual inflows as a later-listed product.