Pension funds are beginning to invest in Bitcoin, according to the institutional cryptocurrency asset management firm Grayscale.
Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein tells Bloomberg that the coveted market segment is joining hedge funds and endowments in gaining exposure to BTC through the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.
“We’ve started to see participation not just from the hedge fund segment, which we’ve long seen participation from, but now it’s recently from other institutions, pensions and endowments…
The sizes of allocations they are making are growing rapidly as well.”
Numbers from the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED) showed there was about $18.75 trillion held in US pension funds in 2019.
Grayscale’s suite of crypto investment products boomed throughout 2020 and into the new year. The firm recently acquired 1,313 BTC on behalf of its clients in a single 24-hour day in December. At the time, the batch of BTC was worth $24 million. It is now worth $49 million.
Grayscale now has a total of $27.4 billion in assets under management.
$23 billion is invested in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and $3.5 billion is in the Grayscale Ethereum Trust, followed by smaller allocations in the firm’s other investment products, which cover XRP, Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Zcash (ZEC) and Horizen (ZEN).
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