Grayscale Investments, the world's largest digital asset manager, is digging into the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) with five new new trust offerings Wednesday, including Chainlink's link token, Brave Browser's brave token and MANA, the money for virtual world Decentraland.
- The two remaining trusts will offer exposure to decentralized data storage provider Filecoin's file (FILE) and decentralized video streaming network Livepeer (LPT). All five cryptocurrencies are up on the news. LPT is up over 100% in 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
- The newest Grayscale trusts follows a slate of similar products from other digital asset managers looking to draw in institutional money to the red hot DeFi market. For example, CoinShares released its DeFi Index Token last month, as did Bitwise with its Bitwise DeFi Crypto Index Fund.
- The firm had filed for the trusts in Delaware in late January, as CoinDesk reported at the time.
- We may soon see trusts for Aave, Cosmos, Polkadot, monero and Cardano if other filings are followed through.
- “At any one time, we’re probably maintaining a list of what could be 30 products, could be 40 products that we’re interested in bringing to market,” Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein told Bloomberg.
- The new trusts are the firm's first additions since 2019, and come after Grayscale assessed both potential demand and did due diligence on the underlying protocols, per the report.
- While the five cryptocurrencies now supported for investment are not mainstream yet, Sonnenshein said many of Grayscale's trusts "have historically been a little bit before their time."
- New York-based Grayscale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of CoinDesk.
Update (March 17, 15:30 UTC): Added relevant information on similar product offerings and token prices.