Crypto Giant Grayscale Details Top Altcoins Held by Institutional Investors As 2022 Begins

The world’s largest digital asset manager is offering a look at which crypto assets institutional investors are most interested in.

Grayscale just detailed a complete breakdown of its crypto assets under management (AUM), which amounts to a staggering $40+ billion.

The vast majority of Grayscale’s holdings are in the Bitcoin (BTC) Trust, which accounts for $30.37 billion.

Leading smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH) is in second place with $11.49 billion AUM.

The firm also offers trusts for a dozen altcoins, with holding amounts as follows:

Ethereum Classic (ETC): $418.1 million.
Litecoin (LTC): $229.8 million.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH): $136.6 million.
Decentraland (MANA): $60.6 million.
Zcash (ZEC): $51.1 million.
Horizen (ZEN): $38.6 million.
Livepeer (LPT): $25.2 million
Stellar Lumens (XLM): $20.6 million.
Solana (SOL): $9.6 million.
Basic Attention Token (BAT): $7.2 million.
Chainlink (LINK): $6.2 million.
Filecoin (FIL): $3.4 million.

Grayscale holds an additional $508.3 million in its Digital Large Cap Fund, as well as $10.6 million in the DeFi fund.

The firm recently released a 27-page report about the future of decentralized finance (DeFi) and its impacts on both the crypto and traditional finance industries.

The report states,

“Crypto creates an internet owned by its users and DeFi empowers those users to own a piece of that financial ecosystem. DeFi is the third wave of crypto cloud economy growth and the next wave of fintech [financial technology] innovation.

The Internet expanded access to information and DeFi has the power to do the same for banking. DeFi seeks to transform the way people establish trust on the internet and provide 33 million U.S. underbanked households, 1.7 billion underbanked adults globally, and 4.6 billion internet users a new banking alternative.”

With DeFi accounting for less than 2% of the $8 trillion worldwide financial services industry, Grayscale believes it’s still “early innings” for the nascent ecosystem.

The report highlights how cryptocurrencies are filling a void created by the high fees and low-interest rates consumers encounter with traditional banking.

When it comes to potential risks, Grayscale mentions government regulation, vulnerability to hackers and overall crypto volatility as potential speed bumps.

“DeFi’s regulatory environment is still highly uncertain, and it remains to be seen how [the] US or other regulators will enact policy affecting the ecosystem.

DeFi protocols have been hacked or experienced bugs that have resulted in the loss of user funds or smart contracts not executing as they were intended due to coding errors.

Negative fluctuations in the value of a DeFi protocols’ crypto holdings may materially harm the DApps [decentralized applications] usage, fees revenue, governance utility, and, ultimately, token value.”

You can read the entire Grayscale DeFi report here.

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