Grayscale reopens crypto trusts for investment as Bitcoin price climbs

The fund manager had temporarily stopped taking on new investors in late December but has now resumed for almost all crypto trusts.

Digital asset investment manager Grayscale has resumed accepting new investments into almost all of its cryptocurrency trusts. The investment manager had paused new inflows into six of its trusts in late December 2020, just as the six-month lock-up period for selling recently-purchased shares in its Bitcoin Trust, which trades under the ticker GBTC, was winding up.

As of the time of writing, products such as the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and the Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund Trust are all available for new investors, although the Grayscale Ethereum Trust remains unavailable. The Grayscale XRP Trust is inactive, and will likely remain so. In early January, the fund manager had liquidated its holdings of the asset shortly after news broke of a major lawsuit filed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission against Ripple.

Grayscale periodically halts and resumes new investor inflows into its funds; during these periods of closure, the funds remain open for private placement funds. As well as this, all investors in the Grayscale crypto trusts are subject to a six-month lock-up period for newly-purchased shares, after which they are free to sell the shares on the open market to non-accredited investors.

Crypto investors keep a close eye on action from Grayscale, which has evolved into the world’s largest cryptocurrency asset manager. As of Jan. 11, Grayscale has $24.5 billion assets under management across its various crypto funds. In early January, Cointelegraph reported that Grayscale’s purchases of Bitcoin were outstripping the minting of new coins by a factor of three, capping a year of aggressive accumulation by the fund manager. 

Bitcoin is up close to 10% on the week, trading at $35,833 as of press time. With new investments now open, the six-month lock-up period begins afresh. Some analysts have alleged that when this period draws to a close, the Bitcoin spot market is driven higher as shares in Grayscale’s GBTC hit the open market.