Retail investment in bitcoin is on the rise…

As published by Jeff Brown of The Bleeding Edge Newsletter -- Grayscale, a subsidiary of the Digital Currency Group, has become the largest digital currency asset manager in the world.

Founded in 2013, Grayscale operates publicly traded trusts that give investors exposure to cryptocurrencies. It all started with the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which trades on the over-the-counter market.

There’s been a lot of talk about how no bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have been approved yet. And that’s true. But from an investor’s standpoint, GBTC trades almost exactly like an ETF.

So Grayscale makes getting exposure to bitcoin easy. Investors simply look up ticker GBTC in their brokerage account and press “buy.” That’s it. No digital wallets or custodial services to deal with.

The more investors buy GBTC, the more bitcoin Grayscale holds. And it has been growing its holdings of bitcoins hand-over-fist in recent months.

In fact, Grayscale’s holdings have swelled from over 365,000 to 654,885 BTC in the last ten months. That means Grayscale’s stash is now worth more than $38 billion.

And get this – Grayscale now holds 3.1% of all bitcoins in the market. Impressive.

The rise of Grayscale signals a growing interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in the investment community. And to meet this rising demand, Grayscale is rapidly expanding its publicly traded trust offerings.

Grayscale now provides instruments that allow investors to get exposure to Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar Lumens, and Zcash. And it just announced that instruments to trade the Basic Attention Token, Chainlink, Decentraland, Filecoin, and Livepeer are coming soon.

Grayscale will have a total of 14 cryptocurrency investment products when it’s all said and done. And much of this success is thanks to simplifying the process. Grayscale makes investing in cryptocurrencies easy. That’s attractive to both institutions and retail investors.

So the cryptocurrency space is clearly heating up. As solutions like this continue to come to market, it will become easier for the everyday investor to get involved. And that’s good for the entire industry.

Grayscale went from nothing to $38 billion worth of bitcoin in just eight years. And there’s plenty of opportunity for other companies in the space to become billion-dollar companies as well.