Grayscale Changes its Leadership

Grayscale’s new CEO, Michael Sonnenshein, looks forward to “making digital currency investing synonymous with Grayscale.”

Grayscale closed 2020 with $20B in its grasp. The asset manager has increased its holdings by ten times since the start of 2020. During the market’s record sales, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin and crypto investment firms has chosen a new CEO.

Previously the managing director at Grayscale, Michael Sonnenshein, is now the company’s top executive.

In a statement last Thursday, Sonnenshein stated that he looks forward “to making digital currency investing synonymous with Grayscale.”

“If 2020 was the year crypto came of age, showcasing its resiliency and staying power, then we’re at the beginning of true and sustained growth,” he wrote.

Sonnenshein had been with Grayscale since 2014. Before that, he spent a couple of years in junior roles at Bank of America, Barclays, and J.P. Morgan.

This is a significant shake-up for a company that has grown remarkably in recent years. The firm now manages around $20B in assets, the majority of which is in Bitcoin. Grayscale has established itself as a leader in digital investments; in the previous month, its assets have grown by $8B.

Its growth can be credited to its encouraging kind of arbitrage, which allowed traders to take advantage of appealing premiums connected to the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.

Grayscale Investments, the institutional cryptocurrency fund, said in a report that Bitcoin is displaying the same signs before the notorious 2017 run. The Bitcoin market structure “bears parallels that of early 2016 before it began its historic bull run,” it said.

It also recognized several on-chain metrics that point towards an augmented public sentiment on the larger crypto market. An important take away from that was the upsurge in long-term holding over short-term guesswork, showing a sustainable price rally compared to 2017’s boom and bust.

Aside from that, Grayscale offered eight other funds that focused on individual cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Litecoin, and Stellar. The company also gives a diversified “digital large-cap” fund, which allocated money in coins with a significant market cap; XRP was lately removed from this fund. After SEC’s claim that it is unregistered security.