What Is the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust?

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust is a digital currency investment product that individual investors can buy and sell in their own brokerage accounts. On January 21, 2020, it became an SEC reporting company, registering its shares with the Commission and designating the Trust as the first digital currency investment vehicle to attain the status of a reporting company by the SEC. This will allow accredited investors who purchased shares in the Trust’s private placement to have an earlier liquidity opportunity, as the statutory holding period of private placement shares would be reduced from 12 months to 6 months, according to SEC rules.

More About the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust

The Grayscale Investment Trust debuted as The Bitcoin Investment Trust on Sept. 25, 2013 as a private placement to accredited investors and, later on, received FINRA approval for eligible shares to trade publicly. This means that investors have access to buy and sell public shares of the Trust under the symbol GBTC. Grayscale Investments calls it a traditional investment vehicle with shares titled in the investor’s name. Although the Trust is not an ETF itself, Grayscale says it’s modeled on popular commodity investment products like the SPDR Gold Trust, a physically backed ETF. 

GBTC is traded publicly on the OTCQX, an over-the-counter market, under the Alternative Reporting Standard for companies not required to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Its success mirrors that of Bitcoin because its value is derived solely from that cryptocurrency.

As of September 11, 2019, GBTC had approximately $2.16 billion in assets under management (AUM) and 2.4 million shares outstanding. The trust requires a minimum investment of $50,000 and charges an annual fee of 2.0 percent, which accrues daily, for accredited investors who wish to subscribe to the Trust as a private placement. On the other hand, investors are eligible to purchase as little as one share of the GBTC public quotation.

Grayscale suggests that its management of the fund is worth more than the annual fee, and one of its major selling points is its security. Storing cryptocurrency safely is notoriously challenging, and the company assures investors that the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s assets “are safeguarded by a robust security system that uses industry-leading security standards.”

As an investment vehicle which trades over-the-counter, GBTC is available for investors to buy and sell in the same way as virtually any U.S. security. As an example, GBTC can be traded through a brokerage firm, and it’s also available within tax-advantaged accounts like IRAs or 401(k)s.

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Disadvantages of GBTC

Andrew Left of Citron Research has publicly criticized the Grayscale Investment Trust, and Citron has tweeted that GBTC is the “most dangerous way to own Bitcoin.” Possible disadvantages of investing in the Trust include paying high premiums along with the annual fee, along with the risk factors associated with the overall volatility in the cryptocurrency market, as well as with investments vehicles that aren’t required to register with the SEC. 

Because the Trust is currently the only fund of its kind specifically for bitcoin, investors have been paying a high premium. In Sept. 2018, shares of GBTC traded at a high of $7.95, which was around 20% higher than the value of the bitcoin within the trust that each share represented at that time. Although that premium is significant, it’s lower than it has been in the past — GBTC has closed at prices more than two times the value of its underlying bitcoins. Grayscale offers that prices are dictated by the market and not by Grayscale itself, so price fluctuations may be a result of supply and demand.

As of Oct. 2018, each share of GBTC represented less than 0.001 bitcoin. That means it would take more than 1,000 shares of GBTC to own one bitcoin. GBTC saw a steady increase in 2017 and peaked at the end of the year. However, its performance in 2018 has fluctuated, and overall, GBTC has trended downward, with a nearly 65% year-to-date decline as of Oct. 2018. Steeper declines could mean that shares could lose most or all of their value. In 2019, as Bitcoin’s price has generally trended upward, GBTC has followed.