Grayscale Investments will explore gaining exposure to a variety of Decentralized Finance protocol tokens in light of investor demand.
Grayscale has established itself as the world’s largest digital currency asset manager over the past year and the growth of its various cryptocurrency trust’s has been staggering to watch. It’s Bitcoin Trust became one of the fastest growing investment products in the world in 2020, growing from $1.8 billion to $17.5 billion AUM.
Grayscale Investments’ total assets under management (AUM) grew by more than 100 percent last year as well, having started the year with $2bln in AUM in comparison to the more than $36bln it now manages at the end of February 2021.
Given the massive interest in the firm’s nine different cryptocurrency Trusts, Grayscale has announced that it is exploring some new product offerings in the world of DeFi. Even though it already has eight single asset trusts and one diversified fund, Grayscale is looking at new products ‘to better meet growing investor demand for exposure to digital assets through familiar, secure, and regulated investment products.’
The growth of DeFi has been a major talking point in the cryptocurrency space over the past year as well and it is hardly surprising to see a variety of DeFi tokens listed by Grayscale in its announcement.
The tokens include Aave (AAVE), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Cardano (ADA), Chainlink (LINK), Compound (COMP), Cosmos (ATOM), Decentraland (MANA), EOS (EOS), Filecoin (FIL), Flow (Dapper Labs) (FLOW), Livepeer (LPT), MakerDao (MKR), Monero (XMR), Numeraire (NMR), Polkadot (DOT), Reserve Rights (RSR), Stacks (STX), Sushiswap (SUSHI), Synthetix (SNX), Tezos (XTZ), The Graph (GRT), Uniswap (UNI) and Yearn Finance (YFI).
Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said that the firm is looking to invest in projects that are at the forefront of technological innovation.
“The digital currency universe is constantly evolving and we seek to identify bold, interesting, and innovative opportunities that satisfy our investors’ demand for differentiated exposure to this burgeoning asset class.’
Sonnenshein cautioned that potential Trusts that are invested in DeFi projects may not be as successful as the likes of its Bitcoin and Ethereum Trusts, but asserted that driving investment into the space will contribute to the development of the global financial system.
“But as a firm that has been on the vanguard of connecting the legacy financial system with the new, digital currency-driven financial system, we view it as our responsibility to introduce investors to more diversity in this space.”
The firm also noted its intent to explore creating new products does not necessarily mean that they will be launched, and are subject to an extensive internal and external process.
