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The Grayscale Investments has increased its Bitcoin holdings by 60,000 coins in the past 100 days – equal to roughly one-third of all Bitcoin produced at that time.
Given that 88% of Grayscale’s customers fall into the institutional category, this latest finding could be a bullish indicator of how the business class views Bitcoin.
Grayscale Rapidly Increasing Bitcoin Holdings
Independent research posted to a cryptocurrency sub-Reddit tracked the number of Bitcoins in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) since 2017. The report indicated that the number of BTC held by Grayscale increased from 283,192 on Feb 7, 2020, to 343,594 on May 17, just a hundred days later. According to the trust’s official website, on May 15, 2020, the assets under management equal $3.3 billion.
“For good measure, 60,000 Bitcoins in last 100 days is about 33 – 34% of all newly minted bitcoins in that period, give or take.” As concluded by the researcher.
For some context, in the 12 months between December 2018 and 2019, the number of Bitcoin in Grayscale’s trust increased by just 30,000 coins.
The rate of acquisition started to pick up, moving from 2019 into the current year of 2020. In the ten months between July and May of those years, respectively, the number of coins in the trust increased by 80,000.
This makes the recent accrual of 60,000 coins in just 100 days all the more remarkable. One assumption would be that the Bitcoin halving may have acted as a catalyst. That assumption would be backed up at least partially by the data, which shows a sharp increase in the rate of acquisition beginning in late April, just a few weeks before the halving.
Institutional Interest on the Rise?
In 2018, Grayscale’s Digital Asset Report for the first half of the year showed that 56% of their custom came from institutional investors.
By the time of the publication of the Q1 report for 2020, that number had increased to 88%. While institutional interest shouldn’t be regarded as a sure-fire sign of Bitcoin’s future success, the numbers suggest that cryptocurrency is moving away from being considered as that weird, criminal internet thing.
In April, it was revealed that Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust had acquired nearly 50% of all ETH mined in 2020.
As the compiler of the research commented, Grayscale Investments isn’t the only trust in the game:
“And GBTC is just one of the many ETFs that people who don’t want to fiddle with private keys etc, can use to acquire Bitcoin, albeit the largest one,” they wrote.