Grayscale owns $5 billion worth of ETH, according to an official statement, as institutional players take center stage in the cryptocurrency market.
Arkham Intelligence identified Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust as the second-largest Ethereum (ETH) holder in a tweet on Sept. 1.
The firm said the trust is the “second-largest ETH entity in the world” and that the fund contains $5 billion in ETH (which appears to have been rounded down from $4.9 billion).
The funds were distributed among more than 500 addresses, each holding $30 million or less, Akrham said. Arkham said it identified the addresses by analyzing activity and cross-referencing with Grayscale’s publicly reported balances.
Although Arkham claims that the assets have never been identified, Grayscale’s own website shows that its Ethereum Trust manages nearly $5 billion in assets. Therefore, Arkham appears to be the first to identify specific addresses associated with the fund, rather than the first to discover the fund’s balance.
Notably, there appear to be major discrepancies between Arkham’s data and Grayscale’s own reporting on other crypto funds. While Grayscale says its Bitcoin Trust holds $16.3 billion, Arkham reports that Grayscale only holds $92.1 million in Bitcoin. A variety of other cryptocurrency assets are also listed in Arkham’s Grayscale profile.
Unlike Arkham’s previous findings, which identified Robinhood as the owner of the third-largest Bitcoin wallet ($3 billion) and the fifth-largest Ethereum wallet ($2.5 billion), the Grayscale findings do not involve a single crypto wallet.
The court victory was accompanied by news
Grayscale scored a legal victory on August 29, when a court overturned an earlier rejection by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The current legal outcome will require the SEC to review (but not necessarily approve) Grayscale’s proposal to convert its GBTC fund into a spot Bitcoin ETF.
Grayscale appeared to abandon plans to create an Ethereum futures ETF in May, Bloomberg reported at the time. #Arkham #Grayscale
