Grayscale's 26 Crypto Trusts: A Review of Their Investment Returns

Recently, Grayscale launched the Optimism Trust Fund and the Lido Trust Fund. Among its trust funds, SUI and ZEN also continued to rise despite a pullback.

Grayscale, a digital asset management company founded in 2013, offers a variety of crypto asset trust funds. These funds provide investors with legal and regulated investment channels. Grayscale is known for its large-scale crypto asset management, with billions of dollars in assets under management. To date, Grayscale has launched 26 crypto trusts.

Grayscale Trust Funds are crypto asset investment products that allow investors to indirectly hold cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum without directly purchasing and managing cryptocurrencies. Each trust fund is linked to a specific crypto asset, such as the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust Fund (GBTC) and the Grayscale Ethereum Trust Fund (ETHE). Through these trust funds, investors can buy and sell shares of crypto assets on the open market like investing in traditional stocks.

In addition to single-currency trust funds, Grayscale's basket of currency combination funds also have strong investment reference significance. Currently, Grayscale's crypto trusts, except for ETFs, have three main product cycles.

According to the report, Grayscale had a significant impact on cryptocurrencies during the bull market from 2020 to 2021, where it greatly increased the asset size of the Bitcoin Trust and introduced a large number of institutional investors to the crypto field. Other crypto tokens launched by Grayscale during this period have performed differently in the short term and are unlikely to fare better than BTC in the long term.

To track the investment return rate of Grayscale Fund, I recorded the token price when Grayscale Fund launched the trust and the token price on December 23, and made the above chart. In terms of time, Grayscale launched crypto trust products in 2018 and 2021, which were mostly at the peak or the second half of the bull market. This phenomenon may be related to the relatively long cycle and relatively mature market required for Grayscale to launch funds. In December this year, Grayscale began to launch trust funds in a concentrated manner. Can it break the cycle of short-term highs this time?

In terms of investment returns, in the long run, only about 48% of the tokens (including BTC and ETH) have a positive investment return, which is lower than the 50% probability of a random coin toss. Moreover, its investment return rate is far lower than that of BTC, showing a negative EV in the long run.

In the short term, the tokens launched by Grayscale did have their moments of glory, but most of them occurred before their launch. XRP has not yet broken through its previous high even after a strong rebound, and ZEN has barely maintained an 18% return on investment after rising for three consecutive days. Although some star tokens have reached their highs after their launch, from a long-term annualized perspective, after a long 7-year holding period, their interest rates are even lower than 10%. However, different timing of position building has a more important impact on investment returns. If Grayscale concept coins are built in a bear market to buy the bottom, almost all of them will outperform the average increase in the bull market. At this time, the targets that have not yet shown obvious changes may see a good increase next year.

Grayscale's holdings of tokens have different indicative functions at different moments in the cycle. In this sense, Grayscale's strict selection does exist.