Cryptocurrency asset manager Grayscale Investments has reportedly been buying around 33% of all newly minted bitcoin, as data shows it is buying around $29.9 million worth of the cryptocurrency every week.
According to Reddit user parakitej, in the 100 days preceding May 17, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC) added more than 60,000 BTC (over $500 million) to its holdings, as they rose from 283,192 BTC to a total of 343,954 BTC.
The redditor noted that 60,000 BTC in the last 100 days equals around one-third of all newly minted bitcoin, meaning demand from institutional investors has kept on growing this year.
For good measure, 60k bitcoins in last 100 days is about 33-34% of all newly minted bitcoins in that period, give or take. And Grayscale is just one of the many ETF’s that people who don’t want to fiddle with private keys etc, can use to acquire bitcoin, albeit the largest one.
Twitter analyst Kevin Rooke added that Grayscales Bitcoin Trust saw an average weekly investment of $29.9 million in the first quarter of the year, while it saw an average weekly investment of around $3.2 million in the first quarter of last year.
Grayscale runs several cryptocurrency investment products focused on institutional investors. It has over $3.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency under management, and its funds cover top cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, zcash, XRP, and more.
The funds allow investors to gain exposure to top cryptocurrencies without actually having to manage private keys, and instead pay a management fee. As CryptoGlobe reported, Grayscale saw a record $500 million inflows in the first quarter of the year, nearly doubling its previous record high of $354.8 million in Q3 2019.
Its most popular funds are GBTC and its Ether Trust (ETHE), which saw institutional investors buy the dip in cryptocurrency markets earlier this year. In comparison Grayscale, a unit of the New York-. based Digital Currency Group, raised a total of $600 million in 2019.
Featured image via Unsplash.
