Grayscale holds $3.7 billion and it’s nearly all Bitcoin

By Will Heasman

Digital asset manager Grayscale now boasts a total of $3.7 billion worth of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several other cryptocurrencies under management—marking an all-time high for the firm. These funds are held on behalf of its investors.

This latest update represents a $500 million increase in Grayscale's total AUM since its Q1 report published March 31, 2020. In fact, in a little under a year, Grayscale added $1 billion (37%) to its total assets under management (AUM), with the firm reporting $2.7 billion AUM in July 2019.

First arriving on the scene in 2013, with the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the asset manager has amassed a huge amount of cryptocurrency since. Heavily focused on Bitcoin to begin with, the firm eventually diversified into several additional large-cap cryptocurrencies.

Yet Grayscale still retains the vast majority of today's holdings in its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which maintains $3.3 billion worth of Bitcoin—the equivalent of 89.1% of total AUM.

As reported by Decrypt, Grayscale, along with Square's bitcoin payments processor, CashApp, bought up an amount of Bitcoin equivalent to half of all newly minted Bitcoin in Q1 of 2020.

A vast chunk of Grayscale's remaining allocated funds lies in the Grayscale Ethereum Trust, with the second-largest cryptocurrency claiming $279 million, or 7.5% of Grayscale's AUM.

This institutional demand for ETH appears to be a growing trend. 2020 has been a particularly good year for the Ethereum Trust, with the firm boasting over $110 million in ETH inflows in the first quarter of 2020 alone. This is increasing at a much faster rate than the previous two years, which saw inflows at an average of $12 million per quarter.

But will investors be in it for the long run or is this all just a bet on the halving?

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