Grayscale Bitcoin Trust BTC Holdings Dropped 55% in First Half of 2024

Grayscale Investments disclosed Friday that its flagship Bitcoin fund has shed more than 348,000 Bitcoin in its past two quarters as investors bail for other funds. That’s a sum valued at around $22.4 billion based on today’s prices.

Not long before the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) converted into a spot Bitcoin ETF in January, the fund held close to 620,000 Bitcoin. In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Grayscale stated that figure has since fallen below 276,000.

From December’s end through June, the decrease in GBTC’s Bitcoin holdings represents 55% of its starting stash, as other asset managers have pushed investment vehicles of their own. During that period, the value of GBTC’s Bitcoin holdings fell to $17 billion from $26.3 billion.

Grayscale did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.

Investors are charged a management fee for holding spot Bitcoin ETFs, and waivers aside, GBTC charges the most compared to similar options. Still, Grayscale launched a Mini Trust Wednesday, a GBTC spin-off that vastly undercut competitors’ costs for investors. Franklin Templeton’s spot Bitcoin ETF is closest, as of now, with an expense ratio of 0.19%.

Grayscale’s Mini Trust charges a management fee of 0.15%, while GBTC’s fee stands at 1.5%. In the run-up to GBTC’s conversation, Grayscale lowered GBTC’s fee from 2%, in a bid to appeal to investors who might prefer holding a cheaper investment product.

While ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity have seen net inflows of $20 billion and $10 billion, respectively, GBTC has seen $19 billion in net outflows this year. Notably, Bitcoin’s price hovered around $46,000 when the so-called Cointucky Derby kicked off in January.

A rising Bitcoin price means the fund’s change in value wasn’t as stark as its change in the number of Bitcoin held. Even though GBTC has lost more than half of the Bitcoin it had at the start of this year, the fund’s overall value declined by only 35% in the past two quarters.

Outflows from GBTC initially dominated the conversation around spot Bitcoin ETFs, as the fund’s outflows outweighed other allocations to products that had just launched. For example, GBTC saw around $4.7 billion in outflows during its first 10 trading days as a spot ETF, partly due to arbitrage traders capitalizing on GBTC’s discount that had disappeared.

Because GBTC was once a closed-end fund, shares in the product couldn’t be redeemed to keep GBTC’s price in line with its underlying amount Bitcoin. While investors could only sell shares on a secondary market, that discount to net asset value peaked around 48% in 2022.

A substantial amount of GBTC shares were also sold this year by the bankruptcy estates of collapsed crypto firms, such as Genesis and FTX. Those two entities alone were approved to sell around $2.5 billion worth of shares in Grayscale’s flagship fund.

Over time, the pace of daily outflows has slowed considerably for GBTC, averaging around $30 million in the past ten trading days. Still, the product has only notched 12 days of positive inflows since its conversion from a closed-end fund, peaking at around $63 million in May.

When it comes to Grayscale’s Mini Trust, GBTC holders received shares through a distribution event that also saw 10% of GBTC’s existing Bitcoin allocated into the new product. The shift took place after the reporting period for GBTC’s first two fiscal quarters of this year.

Established in 2013, Grayscale sued the SEC over repeated denials to convert GBTC into a spot Bitcoin ETF in 2022. Winning the court battle that forced the regulator to reconsider its long-held stance, Grayscale’s victory ultimately set the stage for spot Bitcoin ETFs this year.

Edited by Andrew Hayward