JPMorgan remains confident in the eventual approval of spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), despite previously assigning only a 50% chance of approval by May, the initial deadline.

Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, managing director and global market strategist at JPMorgan, stated that if there's no approval in May, they anticipate a litigation process afterward. They believe it's likely that the SEC will eventually approve spot Ethereum ETFs, although not necessarily by May, drawing parallels with past legal battles involving entities like Grayscale and Ripple.

Despite recent reports of the SEC investigating the Ethereum Foundation and exploring the classification of ether (ETH) as a security, Panigirtzoglou maintains a 50% chance of May approval.

Panigirtzoglou's team noted in a recent report that Ethereum's decreasing centralization concerns, such as Lido's diminishing market share, increase the likelihood of ETH avoiding security classification. They highlighted the role of network decentralization in determining a digital token's security status, citing the SEC's "Hinman documents" from last June.

There's decreasing optimism among analysts regarding May approval for a spot ether ETF. Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, for example, revised his odds from 70% in January to just 25% recently.

Currently, the SEC is gathering comments on several spot ETH ETF applications, including those from Fidelity, Grayscale, and Bitwise. The deadline for comments on all three applications is later this month.