Grayscale Investments, the largest cryptocurrency fund in the world, announced a Solana trust, adding the growing cryptocurrency to its list of product offerings. They have shown great interest in Solana’s performance and see a near and long-term potential in it because of its capability for experimentation. In a public release, Grayscale Investments said they will be “enabling investors to gain exposure to SOL in the form of a security while avoiding the challenges of buying, storing, and safekeeping SOL directly.” This will require a $25,000 minimum investment, charging Grayscale’s standard 2.5% management fee. Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein commented to Forbes:
In many investors’ minds, there’s a continued appetite to invest in Solana, In some sense, it is a more cost-effective blockchain \[than Ethereum\], and today we are seeing over 500 decentralized apps and about 1.2 million monthly active users on the network. When you kind of take a step back, and you see how quickly it has been able to ramp up, it’s certainly pretty impressive. Regarding the investor’s appetite for Solana, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is a strong supporter of the digital asset, giving a constant public endorsement that has become a key point of its current visibility. Bankman-Fried has shared his view on Solana being better than Ethereum given its lower fees and possibilities of use and recently claimed it has the potential of becoming the next Bitcoin by mass adoption level. With this addition, Solana becomes the 16th offering in Grayscale’s product line. They also provide exposure to Bitcoin (BTC), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Chainlink (LINK), Decentraland (MANA), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Filecoin (FIL), Litecoin (LTC), Livepeer (LPT), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Zcash (ZEC), and Horizen (ZEN). Solana, the “Ethereum killer”, has had a great year overall, being in the investor’s spotlight, rallying to new all-time highs, showing massive adoption. It has aggressively dominated the terrain of funds held in cryptocurrency wallets. The cryptocurrency managed to climb to the 4th position of largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, with a value of over $70 billion. The inclusion of Grayscale’s portfolio promises more visibility around institutional and individual accredited investors.
Grayscale Sees Potential In Solana
Despite the issues Solana has faced -such as the network’s 17-hour outage- and being more centralized than its close competitors, many call for its staking token SOL to hit $300 next, after having rallied close to $217,50 recently. Solana also dominates DeFi services and NFT minting, and its native token SOL became one of the best-performing assets of the year. Solana Lab’s CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, recently commented to The Block that the chances of the network going down again don’t really matter “in terms of safety to funds in the state”, not worried about the possibility of it happening again as he claims the users have nothing to worry about if they do not care about the time the transactions could take during an outage. Sonnenshein shared that Grayscale sees near and long-term potential in Solana, not only seeing the growing interest from important investors but its fields of use for blockchain technology.
What’s been interesting about Solana is that it gives users the ability to learn, experiment, and build. They generally have more budget to experiment on the protocol than some other more established blockchains like Ethereum, because of lower transaction fees.