GBTC Added $1.6B in December But Grayscale Hasn’t Purchased Any BTC in Over a Week

The firm hasn’t purchased any ETH in nearly a month while its total AUM has reached a new ATH of $20 billion.

The largest crypto asset manager Grayscale Investments has ended 2020 at $20 billion in assets under management (AUM).

This is a huge uptick in a year that started with just $2 billion. But this journey has just started as Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group (DCG) tweeted, “Here’s to another 10x in 2021.”

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) is also standing at the peak of $19.44 billion.

During the last bull run of 2017, GBTC had $2.5 billion in AUM which declined to $750 million during the 2018 bear market. But since then it has been only going up and last year it gained speed thanks to all the institutional interest Bitcoin has been seeing.

Relentless money printing by central banks all over the world, fiat debasement, USD weakness, and zero and ultra-zero interest rates worked in Bitcoin’s favor and in turn Grayscale.

The price of BTC surged more than 315% in 2020 to hit several all-time highs above $29,000, which are surely influenced Grayscale’s AUM.

However, Grayscale also added a good amount of BTC to its stash. In 2020, Grayscale’s BTC holdings doubled from 261 BTC to 607k BTC.

Adding approximately $1.6 billion in Dec. 2020 alone, amidst BTC’s face-melting uptrend, is “beyond impressive; in 2020 it would have added 6% as much as all gold ETFs and similar vehicles,” noted trader and economist Alex Kruger while sharing his expectation of major central banks eventually holding BTC as a reserve asset.

Kruger noted that gold demand in 2020 was mainly driven by investors’ i.e. ETFs. “Assuming now in five years central bank’s demand for bitcoin stands at 5% of their gold demand. That would generate $1.2 billion in additional bitcoin buying pressure,” he said.

When it comes to GBTC, Grayscale holds 3.26% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply but they haven’t bought any Bitcoin since Dec. 25th and the firm’s ETH stash hasn’t increased since Dec. 9.

Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) has $2.28 billion in AUM and holds 2.94M ETH, which is 2.57% of Ether’s circulating supply.

IMAGE CREDITS: Jack Taylor/Getty Images.