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Grayscale – An Institutional Approach to Cryptocurrency

Grayscale – An Institutional Approach to Cryptocurrency

Grayscale Investments is the world’s largest digital currency asset manager and a subsidiary of the venture capital company Digital Currency Group (DCG) who also owns the digital media company Coindesk. CoinDesk also hosts a conference on digital currencies and blockchain technologies titled Consensus.

As an asset manager, the company offers its services to investors looking to invest in Bitcoin as security, without making direct purchases or managing funds themselves. Grayscale was established in 2013 and incorporated into DCG when it was formed in 2015 by Barry Silbert.

Grayscale manages multiple investment funds, each for large amounts of various cryptocurrencies such as BTC, BCC, ETH, ETC, LTC, XRP, Zcash, Stellar, etc. The most notable of these being the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC), which was the first publicly quoted Bitcoin security when it launched in 2013. The Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC), launched in 2018, allows customers to invest in a group of prominent digital currencies. Grayscale funds were approved for public trading by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in 2019, and are accessible on the OTCQX and the Trust trades under their symbol tickers, GBTC and GDLC, respectively.

FIGURE 1: MULTI-ASSET CLASS PERFORMANCE – 4Q20

This heavily influenced the company’s recent explosive growth, with the company’s asset under management (AUM) nearly tripling from $926 million to $2.7 billion, coinciding with digital asset market resurgence during Q2 2019. That number has grown to more than $24.7B in AUM as of January 13, 2021.

FIGURE 2: GRAYSCALE AUM GROWTH

Coinbase Custody, as a NY-regulated trust company, serves as the custodian for the digital assets of Grayscale since July 29, 2019.

Grayscale Investments has also begun the registration process for new trusts on additional cryptocurrencies and Defi-related assets such as DOT, AAVE, XMR, ADA, ATOM, and EOS between Dec 2020 and Jan 2021. However, the company’s Managing Director, Michael Sonnenshein, had clarified that these were “reservation filings” and does not necessarily reflect Grayscale product releases.

As fiat monetary inflation grows on a global scale, so does the demand for cryptocurrencies as more institutional investors look for alternatives. Increasing digital asset demands in conjunction with the most recent Bitcoin mining rate halving in May 2020 has left little circulating supply of BTC, and Grayscale has been a major contributor to this factor. The amount of BTC that entered the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust during 4Q20 was nearly double the amount of BTC mined over the same period of time.

 

 

FIGURE 3: GRAYSCALE BTC TRUST INFLOWS AS A PROPORTION OF MINED BTC

Grayscale’s 4Q20 Digital Asset Investment reported that their AUM held 3.31% of the circulating supply of Bitcoin at the time, with an additional $600 million purchase of 16,244 BTC in January 2021. The total estimation of BTC in Grayscale’s possession is currently 566,897 BTC at this time.

 

January 2021 – Weekly Recap 4

Weekly Recap

Jan 18th, 2021 - Jan 25th, 2021

Welcome to our 4th weekly recap for February.

Overview 

 

Crypto News

 

President Joe Biden has frozen all new or pending rules introduced during the Trump administration. This includes the FinCEN’s controversial crypto wallet proposal.

On January 21, 2021, a random dude sent $21 to another random dude. And this is news because that transaction triggered a series of unfortunate events that ended up wiping $84Billion from Bitcoin’s total market cap, driving the community into a panic and causing a drop of more than 11% in the price of the largest cryptocurrency in the crypto ecosystem.

GrayScale has had its most successful week yet, buying close to $1.3 billion bitcoin, up considerably from $500 million a week during December.

Crypto asset manager Grayscale has incorporated six more trusts, including those tied to Chainlink (LINK) and Tezos (XTZ) tokens.

Mrs. Janet Yellen has made a follow-up comment about cryptocurrencies since the previous one in her recent confirmation hearing. In what seems like a contrary statement, the Treasury secretary nominee is now asserting the potential of digital currencies.

It’s not a secret that in China, Polkadot resembles a newer, better EOS, the public blockchain that swept the Chinese crypto ecosystem in 2018.

Nasdaq-listed Marathon Patent Group announced Monday that it has purchased around 4,813 bitcoin for about $150 million.

According to its new SEC filing, financial services company Rothschild Investment Corporation now holds 30,454 shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) that allows institutional investors to get exposure to the world’s largest cryptocurrency without directly owning it.

 

BitMEX Research FUD

BitMEX Research FUD

BitMEX’s Research team recently discovered and brought to attention a double-spending attempt on the Bitcoin blockchain, and the result was widespread FUD across the cryptocurrency market.

Whilst alarming indeed if it had succeeded, the blocks’ confirmation can be easily verified using the associated URL. It is quickly apparent that only one transaction request was confirmed.

This has been a thinly-veiled attempt at spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt amongst the particularly newly invested crypto participants.

Situations like this happen often as multiple stale, or orphaned blocks are abandoned when conflicting blocks are discovered. It is a fairly common occurrence.

 

Bitcoin utilizes multiple confirmations for each transaction to ensure that the block is properly verified across the vast majority of exchanges and wallets. BitMex uses a one-block confirmation method which assumes that transactions based on the first block confirmation are final, which is not entirely 100% accurate as blocks can be re-organized as further confirmations happen.

 

This intentional misdirection is absolutely being used for nefarious means as it only takes minimal efforts to verify that the alleged double-spend did not happen, and was not confirmed within the block using https://mempool.space/.

It would be wise to take everything BitMEX Research presents with a healthy dose of salt, and cross-reference the evidence. BitMEX executives have been charged with operating in the United States illegally.

January 2021 – Weekly Recap 3

Weekly Recap

Jan 11th, 2021 - Jan 18th, 2021

Welcome to our 3rd weekly recap for January.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson’s updates have been crucial to the development of the ecosystem over the past year. So is the case this time too, with IOHK’s CEO giving the community some important updates during his latest AMA. During the same, Hoskinson revealed that the Mary hard fork is coming in February, with the same promising to deliver “native multi-asset support” to the Cardano network.

During the Obama administration, Gensler was the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in which capacity he was in charge of enforcing the many new provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

A previous security breach at the e-commerce firm Shopify has exposed sensitive data belonging to customers of around 200 of its merchants.

The NASDAQ-listed business intelligence giant MicroStrategy will host an online conference to educate large organizations about the potential merits of investing in bitcoin. Called “Bitcoin for Corporations,” the initiative has also received support from other industry giants such as Gemini, Binance, Coinbase, Fidelity, Grayscale, and more.

Creditors of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox will be presented with the option to claim up to 90% of the exchange’s remaining bitcoin, according to Bloomberg.

Grayscale Investment has done it again with another record-breaking quarter. In its Q4 2020 report, the leading digital asset manager informed that institutional investors had allocated over $3 billion into its product, with Bitcoin accounting for the most significant part.

Twitter has faced fierce condemnation over the last few days after it decided to ban US Present Donald Trump from its social media platform. A lot of people have opposed the move, seeing it as an attempt by the social media giant to run an online autocratic dictatorship where free speech is strongly restricted.

This year is likely to see unprecedented use and demand on the Ethereum network, so there has never been a better time to ramp up Layer-2 scaling solutions.

 

January 2021 – Weekly Recap 2

Weekly Recap

Jan 4th, 2021 - Jan 11th, 2021

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for January.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

A new interpretive letter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency paves the way for stablecoins and public blockchains to be fully integrated in the financial infrastructure.

Mediterranean Hospital of Cyprus has successfully vaccinated some of its staff against the COVID-19 virus, including 100 doctors and personnel. The process was carried out via the VeChain-powered E-HCert COVID-19 solution, according to a blog post on January 5, 2020.

XRP is on the cusp of being pushed out of CoinMarketCap’s top 5 after Cardano (ADA) soared over 40 percent in a single day.

The world’s largest crypto management fund, Grayscale, has increased its crypto holdings by almost $2 billion in merely one day (as of Jan. 6).

Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Gemini—four of the world’s most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges—experienced technical issues on Thursday after the price of Bitcoin shot past $40,000.

Litecoin will receive smart contract capabilities through Flare Networks, according to a tweet from the latter project.

Citing “the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter has permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account, @realDonaldTrump.

Blockchain platform Polkadot announced that it has hired leading design agency Koto to give the blockchain platform a complete design revamp. However, all key decisions regarding the rebranding process will be driven and approved by the Polkadot community and its representatives on-chain.

Cardano has been an extremely important project in the cryptocurrency ecosystem in the past few years and IOHK has been in the process to expand Cardano’s ecosystem and make it more self-sufficient. As the developments evolve behind the scenes, Cardano has emerged to be the biggest staking network in the world.

Prolific blockchain developer and crypto community member, Dan Larimer, the CTO of Block.one, has announced his resignation today.

 

January 2021 – Weekly Recap 1

Weekly Recap

December 28th, 2021 - Jan 4th, 2021

Welcome to our 1st weekly recap for January.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

In an interesting twist of events, the Mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, has said that he’s open to exploring the idea of putting 1% of the city’s treasury reserves in Bitcoin.

SkyBridge Capital, the investment firm run by Anthony Scaramucci, has reportedly already invested $182 million in bitcoin and said in an investor brochure the flagship cryptocurrency is “digital gold.”

Crypto exchange Bittrex today announced that it will delist privacy coins Monero (XMR), ZCash and Dash on Friday, January 15, at 23:00 UTC.

In a letter sent to the Treasury on December 31st, 9 congresspeople wrote that they have concerns over the proposed crypto ruling by FinCEN.

In yet another major milestone for the premier cryptocurrency, bitcoin on Saturday broke through the $30K price for the first time, setting new all-time highs.

Polkadot (DOT) surged more than 9 percent last week following a home page listing and vote of confidence by cryptocurrency exchange Binance.

Digital investment giant Grayscale has not unloaded more than 9 million XRP following the announcement of a lawsuit against parent company and payments platform Ripple, despite what some data aggregators and news outlets indicate.

Enterprise blockchain firm Iconloop has secured approval from South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT to test its decentralized identity, or DID, technology system to manage driver’s license data in the country.

Ukraine’s government has chosen the Stellar blockchain network as a platform to build a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

 

December 2020 – Weekly Recap 4

Weekly Recap

December 21st, 2020 - December 28th, 2020

Welcome to our 4th weekly recap for December.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

In a new statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. securities regulator says it won’t bring enforcement actions against broker-dealers of digital asset securities that meet a number of requirements during the next five years.

The CME Group, a global markets company, and the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange, has announced that it will be launching Ether futures contracts for institutional traders.

Depending on your view, a devastating blow has been dealt to crypto, or a much-needed purge is in progress due to the SEC suing Ripple and two of its top executives for selling XRP tokens which the regulator claims were unregistered securities.

Elad Roisman has been appointed to chair the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to a tweet shared by Commissioner Hester Peirce.

The world’s biggest crypto cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has exceeded the Visa payment giant by the market capitalization value.

In light of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) impending lawsuit against Ripple, some crypto exchanges have either halted trading for XRP and/or dropped the asset from their platform entirely.

BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment manager with some $8 trillion in assets under management, is looking for a Blockchain Lead in their investments division in New York.

December 2020 – Weekly Recap 3

Weekly Recap

December 7th, 2020 - December 14th, 2020

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for December.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

According to its Dec. 16 press release, CI Global Asset Management has wrapped up the initial public offering (IPO) of its CI Galaxy Bitcoin Fund.

The CME Group, a global markets company, and the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange, has announced that it will be launching Ether futures contracts for institutional traders.

Germany has passed a law that allows electronic securities to be recorded on a blockchain, according to reports from Reuters.

Popular bitcoin exchange company Kraken, today announced new investments and forthcoming features designed to bring the benefits of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to its global exchange.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has confidentially filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

After weeks of speculation that the Treasury Department was working on regulations that would affect crypto wallets, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today issued proposed rules that would “require banks and money service businesses (‘MSBs’) to submit reports, keep records, and verify the identity of customers” who make crypto transactions into unhosted (read: private) wallets.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), an agency of the US Treasury Department, has proposed a new set of rules that would require financial institutions to keep a record of certain transactions sent to private cryptocurrency wallets.

The Binance-backed exchange has added decentralized stock trading for Big Tech mainstays Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. The update is the result of a partnership with Terra and Band Protocol.

As per the latest tweet by CEO Michael Saylor, his business software giant MicroStrategy has just acquired another massive lump of Bitcoin—29,646 Bitcoins worth a whopping $650 million raised recently from investors.

Solana

Solana

Solana is a layer-1 blockchain that is self-operational and does not delegate operations to any other attached chain, with a slight unique application of Proof-of-Stake; the addition of a component called Proof-of-History (PoH) within its consensus. Note that it is not a Delegated Proof-of-Stake, as that was a common mistake.

In contrast to the traditional usage of PoS protocols, the platform uses its consensus mechanism to timestamp transactions to maximize efficiency. This optimization can process up to 50-60,000 transactions per second, or TPS, with a theoretical limit of over 70,000 TPS.

Solana Cryptocurrency Architecture

Transactions are timestamped when they are added to a block, currently implemented at an interval of  800ms, using a decentralized clock based on the SHA256 hash function used in BTC’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

Solana Decentralized Clock

Solana operates using a combination of leaders, validators, archivers, and etc. Leaders are responsible for producing new blocks and rotate every 4 blocks (1.6 seconds). Leaders produce blocks during their allotted slot, and timestamps received transactional entries. This allows transactions within a block to be broken down to their individual entries chronologically and divided into batches where participating nodes share an equally divided workload. Validators receive entries from the leader and submit votes confirming transactions entries are valid. After voting, the validators store result entries until sufficient parity amongst nodes is achieved. Batches of transactions are finally reconstructed after completion.

Transactions are initiated when clients send transactions to any validator’s Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) port. If the node is in a validator role, the transaction is forwarded to the designated node leader. Leader nodes bundles incoming transactions and timestamps them to create an entry to deliver to the appropriate cluster.

Clusters are sets of collaborating validator nodes that maintain the ledger integrity of the Solana blockchain. A node can register with any existing nodes and synchronize its registration to all included nodes at a speed proportional to the square number of participating nodes within the cluster. They are capable of subsecond confirmation and can currently support up to 150 nodes, with plans to scale up to hundreds of thousands of nodes. Confirmation time is also expected to increase logarithmically in relation to the numbers of validators.

“If the base is one thousand, for example, it means that for the first thousand nodes, confirmation will be the duration of three network hops plus the time it takes the slowest validator of a supermajority to vote. For the next million nodes, confirmation increases by only one network hop.”

Clusters are created using a genesis config, which will reference two public keys referring to a mint and a bootstrap validator. The bootstrap validator is responsible for the first entries to its specific ledger and will initialize its internal state with the mint account, which holds the number of native tokens as defined by the genesis configuration. The second validator will then be registered to the bootstrap validator as a validator. Additional validators will be registered with any registered member included in the cluster. When two clusters share a common genesis block, they are merged; but otherwise they will operate independently.

Fundamentals

SOL is currently trading at $1.54 with a circulating supply of 46,596,197 and a max supply of 488,630,611 tokens. The current market cap is $71,835,585 USD.

 

December 2020 – Weekly Recap 2

Weekly Recap

December 7th, 2020 - December 14th, 2020

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for December.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the G7 nations are reportedly unanimous in their call for robust crypto regulations.

Fidelity Digital Assets, the cryptocurrency arm of the Boston-based mutual fund empire, is set to offer Bitcoin-collateralized dollar loans, according to a Dec. 9 report published by Bloomberg.

In what is yet another victory for the still-nascent crypto-market, DBS, Southeast Asia’s biggest bank, has announced that it will launch a cryptocurrency exchange. The planned digital currency exchange will offer Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP, and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Grayscale Investment Trusts added another $240 million or more worth of crypto this week.

Up to 100,000 ETH were also purchased by the company, which now trades at over a 120% premium.

Grayscale, the Bitcoin Trust custodian and digital asset manager, has added another $140 million worth of Bitcoin to their Bitcoin Trust portfolio within the last 24 hours.

Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has completed a $650 million debt offering of 0.750 percent convertible senior notes, according to its Dec. 11 press release.

A new feature in Lumi’s iOS wallet allows traders to buy crypto assets through Apple’s popular payments service.

Cardano announced that Bondly is bringing new DeFi capabilities to its platform. Cardano expects to launch its major Goguen upgrade by end-February 2021.

It appears that Pornhub, the world’s largest adult website, is only accepting crypto for its premium service. The move was noticed on the site today after Visa and Mastercard cut off payments to the website last week.