Grayscale Investments launched its Grayscale Solana Trust this morning, offering investors passive exposure to the proof-of-history and proof-of-stake hybrid Solana network’s SOL cryptocurrency.
The native crypto asset was up 6% over the past 24 hours Tuesday morning, according to CoinGecko, trading at $217 per SOL. Its market cap has receded a bit from the $77 billion all-time high it set at the start of the month to $66 billion. Even so, it has nearly doubled since the start of September, and it’s up more than 13,000% since the start of the year.
The Solana Trust had $9.5 million under management when it launched publicly this morning.
Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said there’s been growing interest among the firm’s clients in expanding their exposure to different types of digital assets. This year alone, the firm has debuted funds to provide exposure to Basic Attention Token (BAT), Chainlink (LINK), Livepeer (LPT), Decentraland (MANA), and Filecoin (FIL).
The Grayscale Decentraland Trust has seen “strong receptivity” from the firm’s clients, Sonnenshein said during a recent interview with Decrypt.
“We have had a front row seat to the mainstream acceptance and adoption of crypto, and increasingly find that investors are diversifying their exposure beyond digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum,” he said in a press release.
The Solana network and its native SOL cryptocurrency have grown significantly in 2021. The price has gone from $1.84 at the beginning of the year to more than $200. In fact, SOL outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum in October, increasing 41.9% for the month.
Rapidly growing interest in DeFi and NFTs paired with high transaction fees on Ethereum seems to have pushed a lot of trading volume onto the Solana network.
Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana co-founder, was sparse with details about new releases and upcoming projects on the network when he spoke with Decrypt during an exclusive interview at the Breakpoint conference in Portugal.
“There’s not a huge major release on the roadmap or anything like that,” he said during the interview, which aired during Decrypt and Yahoo Finance’s Crypto Goes Mainstream event. “The reason why I, as an engineer, hate roadmaps is because it’s really hard to predict anything beyond two weeks.”
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to clarify that SOL is up 134X (or roughly 13,000%), and not 134%, since the start of the year.