SEC Filing Document

Company: T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF
Ticker: 
CIK: 2089855
Filing Type: S-1
Document Type: S-1
Date Filed: 2025-10-22
Accession Number: 0001999371-25-015832
Exchange: 
SIC Code: 6221
SIC Description: Commodity Contracts Brokers & Dealers
URL: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2089855/000199937125015832/activecrypto-s1_102225.htm

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smart contracts that are paid to charities only if the charity satisfies certain predefined conditions. Ethereum is also a platform for creating new crypto assets and conducting their associated initial coin offerings. It has a suite of standards that allow for the creation of fungible crypto assets, such as governance tokens that confer voting power in DAOs or stablecoins pegged to government-backed currencies like the dollar; non-fungible tokens allowing for the creation of unique representations of value, such as digital collectibles, digital art, decentralized identity systems and digital characters and items in metaverses and videogames; and more versatile tokens that bring new utility to DApps by integrating decentralized data provision and indexing. As of the data of this prospectus, a majority of crypto assets in the crypto market were built on the Ethereum Network, with such assets representing a significant amount of the total market value of all crypto assets.

An important set of DApps on the Ethereum
Network exists within the sector known as decentralized finance (DeFi) or open finance platforms, which seek to democratize access to
financial services, such as borrowing, lending, custody, trading, derivatives, and insurance, by removing third party intermediaries.
DeFi can allow users to lend and earn interest on their crypto assets, exchange one crypto asset for another, and create derivative crypto
assets such as stablecoins. As of August 2025, $44 billion worth of crypto assets are deposited on DeFi applications on the Ethereum Network.
Ethereum is also used to create decentralized naming systems, decentralized social networks, and the registry and commercialization of
digital art. More recently, companies and asset managers have started to use Ethereum to tokenize traditional assets such as money-market
funds. While experiencing a significant rise in total value secured by the Ethereum Network since inception, most applications in the
Ethereum ecosystem are still incipient and/or in experimental phase.

Since smart contracts are general purpose
software, they can be naturally used to create highly complex DApps, which can be further combined among themselves in a composable manner
to create even more complex applications. On the other hand, given the nascent nature of the EVM and Solidity, there might be significant
architectural risks and unseen bugs in Ethereum’s current technological stack. This may pose relevant security risks on DApps running
on the platform, lead to the drain, loss or indefinite lock of value deposited on them, and potentially harm users interacting with such
applications or having participation in the total value deposited in a DApp.

Ether
Supply

Unlike bitcoin, the supply schedule
of ether has changed a number of times since the inception of the Ethereum Network. The initial creation of ether involved the issuance
of 72.0 million tokens. Of these, 60.0 million ether (83.33% of the supply) were sold to the public in a crowd sale in 2014, raising approximately
$18 million. Another 6.0 million ether (8.33% of the supply) went to the Ethereum Foundation for operational costs, while 3.0 million
ether each (4.17% of the supply) were distributed to developers who contributed to the network and members of the Ethereum Foundation
for purchasing at the initial crowd sale price.

While currently operating under a PoS
consensus mechanism, the Ethereum Network started operation under a proof-of-work consensus mechanism similar to Bitcoin, migrating to
its current PoS consensus mechanism in September 2022 during an upgrade known as “The Merge.” Over time, new ether was put
into circulation by miners creating blocks on the Ethereum blockchain.

From the Genesis block
to late 2017, the mining subsidy on the Ethereum Network was equal to 5 ether per block. In October 2017, the Byzantium upgrade was
activated, decreasing the mining subsidy to 3 ether and aiming to prepare Ethereum for future scaling solutions. In
February 2019, the Constantinople upgrade further reduced the mining subsidy to 2 ether per block. In December 2020,
Ethereum’s new PoS consensus layer called the Beacon Chain was launched in preparation for The Merge in September 2022,
introducing a deterministic supply curve that issues new ether to validators based on the total amount of ether staked. In
August 2021, the London upgrade introduced the concept of a base fee burn. This means that a portion of the transaction fees
paid by users on the network started being burned, effectively working as an ether supply reduction mechanism. This base fee is
algorithmically adjusted based on network demand, and ether burn is more intense in periods of high network activity. The latest
change in ether monetary policy took place during the Merge, in which mining was deprecated and mining subsidies ceased. Unlike
bitcoin, ether’s supply is uncapped and can be inflationary — that is, with a positive supply growth rate — if
issuance is bigger than burns or deflationary — that is, with a negative supply growth rate — if issuance is smaller
than burns.

In October 2025, ether had a total
circulating supply of about 121 million. In February 2025, of about 120 million circulating supply, approximately 72 million
ether were pre-mined, 50.4 million ether were issued by miners before the switch to PoS, 2.3 million ether were issued to validators
staking ether and 4.4 million ether were burned in base fees. There is no guarantee that the ether issuance policy will remain unchanged
over time, and future modifications to monetary policy might create splits in the Ethereum community and lead to two or more conflicting
Ethereum networks.

Ethereum
protocol, clients and network upgrades

PoS, the fork choice rule, the EVM
architecture and the monetary policy of ether comprise the “Ethereum Protocol,” the full set rules that users of the Ethereum
System have to agree on in order to participate in the network. Implementations of the Ethereum Protocol are called “Ethereum Clients.”
These are open-source codes that can be maintained by anyone and used by any individual wishing to join the Ethereum Network. Every computer
running an instance of an Ethereum Client is called a node. The infrastructure of the Ethereum Network is collectively maintained by various
participants, which includes validators, developers, and users. Validators register transactions inside blocks and provide security to
the Ethereum Network. Developers maintain and contribute updates to Ethereum Clients. Users access the Ethereum Network either running
their own node or communicating with nodes run by a third party server. Anyone can be a user, developer, or validator, but not all network
participants need to run a node.

Similar to BIPs, Ethereum upgrade proposals
are known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). However, all Ethereum upgrades are made through hard forks, which are not backward-compatible
and thus demand Ethereum users to update their clients to continue having access to the Ethereum Network. The Merge introduced the Beacon
Chain as the new consensus layer of Ethereum, responsible for block production and finalization, whereas the original Ethereum chain remained
as the network’s execution layer, in which code execution takes place. This transition was expected since the network’s launch
in mid-2015, and aimed at reducing Ethereum’s overall energy consumption while paving the way for higher scalability and increased
transaction throughput. Since the Merge, all upgrades on Ethereum consist of new releases for both consensus and execution software of
all clients implementing the Ethereum Protocol.

While the Ethereum Protocol is an open-source
project with no official company or group in control, there is one entity called the Ethereum Foundation which supports the development,
growth, and research on Ethereum. It plays a role in stewarding the Ethereum ecosystem, but it does not control or manage the network.
Instead, the Foundation provides resources, grants, and coordination to help maintain the Ethereum protocol and its infrastructure.

Unlike Bitcoin, which has Bitcoin Core
as its dominant client, the Ethereum Network is operated by a more diverse list of clients. In October 2025, about 44% of Ethereum nodes
run the geth client, 18% the nethermind client, 18% of the go-ethereum client, and the remaining are split among other clients. Core developers
of Ethereum clients are able to access, and can alter, the client’s source code and, as a result, they are responsible for official
releases of updates and other changes to Ethereum Clients.

Since the Merge, Ethereum experienced
the successful activation of two other upgrades. First, the Shapella upgrade, activated in April 2023, which enabled ether withdrawals
for validators participating in the network’s consensus layer. Second, the Dencun upgrade, activated in March 2024, which introduced
proto-danksharding (or EIP-4844), a new technology that reduces the costs for second layer solutions known as rollups to post data on
Ethereum and thus significantly decreases transaction fees paid by users using these upper layers to access the Ethereum ecosystem.