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Crypto asset manager Grayscale has incorporated six more trusts, including those tied to Chainlink (LINK) and Tezos (XTZ) tokens.

The trusts were formed by Delaware Trust Company, Grayscale’s “statutory trustee,” in recent months.

Besides LINK and XTZ, the other four trusts include Basic Attention Token (BAT), Decentraland (MANA), Livepeer (LPT), and Filecoin (FIL). All the trusts were formed in December, except the FIL trust, which was incorporated in October. 

The trust formations do not mean Grayscale will launch these products, Michael Sonnenshein, CEO of Grayscale Investments, told The Block.

“Grayscale is always looking for opportunities to offer products that meet investor demands. Occasionally, we will make reservation filings, though a filing does not mean we will bring a product to market. Grayscale has and will continue to announce when new products are made available to investors,” said Sonnenshein.

Grayscale is the largest crypto asset manager in the world. It manages more than $25 billion worth of assets across its products. Its bitcoin product, however, boasts the lion’s share of the total AUM at more than $21 billion.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Investor Bill Miller offered a spirited defense of Bitcoin in a new investor letter published Thursday that focused in part on MicroStrategy, the publicly-traded software firm that has amassed significant holdings of the cryptocurrency.

The Q4 letter noted that Miller Value Partners bought into MicroStrategy’s 0.75% convertible bond and explored the reasoning behind the move. That thread evolved into a wider exploration on the topic of bitcoin, during which Miller wrote:

“Now that we know what Bitcoin is, why might someone want to own some? The short answer is that there is no other asset that combines Bitcoin’s liquidity with its upside potential. Bitcoin is still an emerging and under-owned technology in an enormous addressable market, and it has a brilliant, logically consistent protocol with distributed governance.”

In the letter, Miller sought to rebut some of the criticisms against Bitcoin, including the contention that regulators will ban it. On this, he argued:

“It has worked for twelve years with little regulatory interference under multiple administrations. In fact, the regulatory outlook for Bitcoin in the US has never been brighter, which may explain why so many institutions are now getting involved.”

As to the criticism that Bitcoin is “too volatile to be a store of value or medium of exchange,” Miller contended:

“Indeed, as we flagged earlier, it has done much better than simply “store” value. When Bitcoin’s volatility approaches that of Treasuries, its market cap and price per bitcoin will be immensely higher and leave little room for excess return. At that point, one could imagine Bitcoin transitioning to become a more commonly used medium of exchange.”

Miller’s full letter can be found here.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Janet Yellen, the former chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, moved one step closer to becoming the Biden administration’s Treasury Secretary on Friday morning.

The Senate Finance Committee unanimously cleared Yellen’s nomination, setting the stage for a full floor vote. Such a vote may come as soon as Friday afternoon based on the pace of confirmations for U.S. President Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominations. Yellen is likely to clear a full vote given the 26-0 committee vote.

Assuming Yellen takes the helm at Treasury, she will oversee a government department that has grown its regulatory footprint in the crypto space in recent years.

Yesterday, written testimony published by the Senate indicated that Yellen may take a middle-of-the-road approach to her department’s crypto oversight, arguing that the U.S. government should be mindful of both potential benefits and risks.

“Bitcoin and other digital and cryptocurrencies are providing financial transactions around the globe. Like many technological developments, this offers potential benefits for the U.S. and our allies,” she wrote. “At the same time, it also presents opportunities for states and non-state actors looking to circumvent the current financial system and undermine American interests. For example, the Central Bank of China just issued its first digital currency.”

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

“They start with bitcoin. It is the easiest to understand.”

In the most recent episode of The Scoop, Olaf Carlson-Wee said that recent headlines about institutional investors making waves in the bitcoin market aren’t surprising to him. Since he launched Polychain Capital in 2016, he’s become familiar with new market entrants who start by exploring bitcoin and then ultimately make their way to other ecosystems. 

“It isn’t surprising that these big institutional investors are first getting involved with bitcoin,” he said. “This is effectively electronic gold. Everyone can reason about gold and the value of gold in an easy way.”

From Anthony Scaramucci to Paul Tudor Jones, the bull case for bitcoin as digital gold has been all but cemented as a Wall Street talking point. Yet his interest in bitcoin will find its way to DeFi, Carlson-Wee argues.

“Once you have $100 million of bitcoin, you might start to think how I could get yield on this bitcoin for example,” he said. “A lot of the time the answer there is through on-chain financial contracts.”

Carlson-Wee also believes that interest in DeFi products and services will buck the example of the 2017 ICO bubble and be more long-lasting.

As he put it during the interview:

“The summer of ICOs was a summer, the summer of DeFi was just the beginning of multi-years of compounding growth. The financial engineering in DeFi, I think, at this point is inarguably moving faster than the financial engineering anywhere else in the world. The capital coordination is faster than anywhere else in the world. A lot of these DeFi protocols are bigger than IPOs—regularly. Despite that go regularly unnoticed and are hard to interact with. The user experience barriers here are very high and despite that we see significant traction in terms of volumes.”

Still, Olaf-Carlson Wee said DeFi market participants need to work out the UI problems that make platforms difficult to use. In this episode of The Scoop, Olaf Carlson-Wee digs into:

• The differences between the ICO boom and the current market rally
• How DEXs went from being irrelevant to facilitating billions of dollars in volumes
• Where DeFi goes next
• What he thinks about the upcoming Coinbase IPO
• YFI’s recent proposal to increase inflation 
• Polychain’s lessons learned from the previous 2017 cycle 

Listen to this week’s episode on Apple, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.