Cryptocurrency analytics company Glassnode points out that Grayscale has bought 195,000 ETH in February.
Grayscale continues to have an appetite for cryptocurrency, according to Glassnode. Since the beginning of 2021, the value of Grayscale’s Ethereum under management has doubled. Glassnode tweeted that the ETH under Grayscale’s management now equals $5.5 billion.
Some of this increase, no doubt, is due to the token’s new all-time-high prices. However, Grayscale made a series of purchases as well. One of these purchases, on Feb. 11, included 53,000 ETH.
Grayscale itself posted a tweet on Feb. 11 regarding its holdings.
February Reopening
The Ethereum purchases come after Grayscale reopened its Ethereum trust to qualified investors on Feb. 1. The fund had been closed over the winter holidays, and so institutional investors wanting to ride the ETH rising tide had to sit it out.
Also in the first week, Grayscale purchased 83,678 ETH for a total of $139 million.This brought the company’s total Assets Under Management to $30 billion at then-current prices.
Grayscale Diversifying
The tweet from Grayscale also shows how much the company has diversified since bursting onto the scene in 2020. There are now trusts for Litecoin, Stellar, and ZCash. An XRP fund has been delisted, however. This is due to the potential exposure to (not to mention lack of demand for) XRP because of the SEC lawsuits against Ripple and two of its CEOs.
In spite of the XRP removal, the company continues to grow. It filed with the State of Delaware for a variety of trusts related to DeFi projects. These include Aave, Polkadot, Uniswap (UNI), Cosmos (ATOM), Monero (XMR), Theta, (THETA) and Cardano (ADA). In total, Grayscale has filed for 33 registered trusts with the State of Delaware. Nine are currently live.
Is this the End?
Grayscale is by far the biggest active participant in the cryptocurrency market at the moment. However, it is possible that this will change over the course of 2021. On Feb. 11, the Canadian firm Purpose Investments launched North America’s first Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). The Purpose Bitcoin ETF will trade on the Toronto Exchange.
As ETFs have been the holy grail of institutional investment into cryptocurrency since 2017, when Gemini Trust applied for a bitcoin ETF, this news could shake the institutional investment world. If an American bitcoin ETF is approved by the SEC, the future flow of money to Grayscale by institutions who cannot or will not directly hold BTC is no longer guaranteed.
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