Original author: shaofaye123, Foresight News

Reprinted by: Luke, Mars Finance

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. Is the trust fund launched by Grayscale a collection of blue-chip tokens? Is it profitable in the long run? This article takes you through the 26 crypto trusts currently launched by Grayscale and their investment returns.

Grayscale Crypto Trust at a Glance

Grayscale is a digital asset management company founded in 2013. It mainly provides a variety of crypto asset trust funds, aiming to provide investors with legal and regulated investment channels. As one of the world's largest crypto asset management companies, it manages billions of dollars in assets. So far, Grayscale has launched 26 crypto trusts.

Grayscale Trust Funds are a series of crypto asset investment products provided by Grayscale that allow investors to indirectly hold cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum without having to directly purchase and manage 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.

  • PRIVATE PLACEMENT: Grayscale products will first be launched in the form of private placements, allowing qualified investors to participate in cryptocurrency investment. The initial restriction period for private placements is one year. Currently, Grayscale Sui Trust, Grayscale Lido DAO Trust, etc. are in this stage.

  • PUBLIC QUOTATION: A market form of public quotation that allows all investors to participate in the cryptocurrency investment. However, due to the lack of an ongoing repurchase plan, publicly traded stocks may trade at a premium or discount to the value of their underlying assets. Currently, MANA, GLNK, DEFG, etc. are all in this stage.

  • SEC REPORTING: Grayscale products are the first to report to the SEC. The requirement to report to the SEC will further increase the level of disclosure, provide greater transparency to investors, and subject products to additional regulatory oversight. Currently, ETCG, ZCSH, HZEN, etc. are all in this stage.

It’s hard to win BTC in the long run

According to the report, Grayscale had a significant impact on cryptocurrencies during the bull market from 2020 to 2021, when it significantly increased the asset size of the Bitcoin Trust and introduced a large number of institutional investors to the crypto field. However, other crypto tokens launched by Grayscale during this period performed differently in the short term and were unlikely to outperform BTC in the long term.

In order to track the investment return rate of Grayscale Fund, the author recorded the token price when Grayscale Fund launched the trust and the token price on December 23, and made the above chart. From the perspective 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 investment return of 18% after three consecutive days of growth. 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 timings for building positions have a more important impact on investment returns. If Grayscale concept coins build positions and buy at the bottom in a bear market, almost all of them will outperform the average increase in the bull market. At this time, the targets that have not yet seen significant 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.