Billion-dollar investment giant Grayscale is launching a national crypto advertising campaign to bring Bitcoin and other digital assets to the masses.
The digital asset management firm paid for ads that will kick off next week on CNBC, MSNBC, FOX, and FOX Business, according to Barry Silbert, the founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group – Grayscale’s parent company.
The new ads won’t be Grayscale’s first advertisements. Last year, the investment giant launched a “#DropGold” ad campaign designed to convince consumers to abandon the precious metal and invest in BTC.
The new ad campaign comes after Grayscale raised more than $900 million in new investment inflows in the second quarter of 2020 alone. That’s up from $500 million in Q1 2020.
Michael Sonnenshein, Grayscale’s managing director, recently spoke with Laura Shin on the Unconfirmed podcast about the factors behind the asset manager’s recent success.
“I think that the macro environment is causing a lot of investors to focus on crypto in a way that they perhaps hadn’t before. I think one of the most topical things that investors are talking to us about is unlimited quantitative easing, and as they look at how much the Fed and other governmental bodies are printing, they’re really starting to drill into the verifiable scarcity of assets like Bitcoin.
And when you think about that very important attribute that Bitcoin has, and then you combine it with Bitcoin’s uncorrelated nature – and it’s not just Bitcoin, it’s other digital currencies as well – investors are really starting to appreciate that there is a new and uncorrelated return stream that they can maybe get from having exposure to digital currencies, and now is really the time we’re seeing a lot of investors dig in on the space.”
Grayscale has 10 different digital asset investment products in total, and Sonnenshein notes they’ve seen a “marked uptake” in interest in their products across the board. In the second quarter, they noticed particular interest in the Grayscale Ethereum Trust.
“I believe now of our returning institutional investors, we now see over 80% of them having now invested in more than one Grayscale product, meaning they now each have exposure to more than one digital currency.”
The managing director also notes that Grayscale Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin Trusts have satisfied the regulatory obligations to become publicly traded.
“Both of those products were recently assigned ticker symbols and are now just awaiting their DTC eligibility before they’ll begin trading, and I’m also happy to share that Grayscale’s not going to stop at the 10 products we have today. We’re working on and always maintaining a list of other products that we’d like to bring to market.”
Sonnenshein says Grayscale expanded its investor base by 24% or 25% in Q2.