Grayscale Plans Five New Crypto Funds as Bitcoin Trust Soars

(Bloomberg) -- Grayscale Investments, which made it easier for mainstream investors to bet on Bitcoin, plans to offer four new single-currency crypto funds and another based on a basket of digital currencies by the start of April.

“By the end of the first quarter of this year, we’ll have a total of eight investment products,” Grayscale Managing Director Michael Sonnenshein said in an interview Tuesday in Vancouver.

Grayscale’s original Bitcoin Investment Trust, which trades over-the-counter in the U.S., has surged more than 1,300 percent in the last year as institutional investors barred from buying digital coins directly nevertheless seek exposure to the dizzying gains of cryptocurrencies. So great has been the demand that the fund -- known by its ticker symbol, GBTC -- has often traded far above its net asset value.

Along with the Bitcoin vehicle, Grayscale already offers Ethereum Classic and Zcash funds.

Sonnenshein declined to name the four new cryptocurrencies it would target, but said the funds would be structured like the Bitcoin Investment Trust, giving investors the ability to gain exposure to digital currencies through the purchase of a security. He declined to say how many cryptocurrencies the basket would include.

‘Ears Open’

“We’re super excited about the new basket product,” Sonnenshein said. “That vehicle will hold the top liquid digital currencies, it will be market cap-weighted, and balanced on a quarterly basis.”

The New York-based firm is “keeping our ears open to what investors want exposure to,” Sonnenshein said. “If there are certain currencies that investors are asking of us to structure products around, then we want to be there to satisfy that demand.”

Grayscale, which tried to list the Bitcoin trust last year on the NYSE Arca market before the plan was scrapped, doesn’t intend to target its new products to the exchange, he added.

To contact the reporter on this story: Natalie Obiko Pearson in Vancouver at npearson7@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Scanlan at dscanlan@bloomberg.net, Josh Friedman, Dan Reichl

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