On Thursday (January 17th), New York-based cryptoasset investment firm, Grayscale Investments (“Grayscale”), a subsidiary of Barry Silbert’s incubator and venture capital firm Digital Currency Group (DCG), announced that it had launched a new single asset fund—Grayscale Stellar Lumens Trust—designed to give investors exposure to the price movement of Stellar Lumens (XLM), which is currently the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap.
Grayscale offers two type of investment products:
- single asset
- diversified
Until today, Grayscale offered the following single asset funds:
- Grayscale Bitcoin Trust
- Grayscale Bitcoin Cash Trust
- Grayscale Bitcoin Cash Trust
- Grayscale Ethereum Trust
- Grayscale Ethereum Classic Trust
- Grayscale Horizen Trust
- Grayscale Litecoin Trust
- Grayscale XRP Trust
- Grayscale Zcash Trust
As for the “diversified” category, there is one product on offer here: Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund. This diversified fund gives investors exposure to the price movement of a diversified mix of large cap digital assets; currently, these digital assets are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC).
This is how Grayscale announced the news on Twitter:
1/ We are excited to announce two big developments! First, today marks the launch of Grayscale Stellar Lumens Trust! Investors can now gain exposure to the price movement of XLM through a traditional investment vehicle. For more info go to https://t.co/izJooCsKwS
— Grayscale (@GrayscaleInvest) January 17, 2019
Managing director Michael Sonnenshein told Fortune that the XLM fund was created “in response to investor demand” and that he was “personally bullish on Stellar’s real world use case, which is to act as a bridge currency in transnational money corridors.” He explained:
“I think the theory is a sound one. An American bank may be keeping large amounts of currencies in foreign banks, and to be able to bring those balances of foreign currencies onto a balance sheet as working capital is valuable. Financial institutions won’t be required to hold balances all over the place. This will improve efficiency and shore up balance sheets for other uses.”
Of course, Ripple’s xRapid product uses a roughly similar idea to help financial institutions (that are members of its global payment network RippleNet) with cross-border payments, with XRP used as the bridge currency.
Sonnenshein also told Fortune that the launch of this new fund is another sign that reports about the collapse of the crypto markets have been greatly exaggerated, and that “net investment inflows into Grayscale continues to climb,” and for him this is due to “growing interest in crypto from professional investors” and “the availability of crypto products that have the regulatory safeguards required by institutions.”
At press time, according to CryptoCompare, XLM is trading at $0.1066, up 0.19% in the past 24-hour period.
Featured Image Courtesy of Grayscale Investments
