Amid FTX Collapse, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust Hits Record-Low Discount

investopedia.com:

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) fell to a record 43% discount to the value of its underlying bitcoin assets after the collapse of FTX. 

GBTC, which allows investors to gain bitcoin exposure without investing directly, has seen a decline in recent months, which has worsened after FTX collapsed. In September 2013, Grayscale launched the GBTC Bitcoin tracker fund, which is owned by the Digital Currency Group (DGC), which also owns Genesis.Earlier this week, due to the FTX fiasco Genesis reportedly sought a $1 billion rescue fund before suspending withdrawals from its platform.Interestingly, the Digital Currency Group also owns CoinDesk, which broke the news about the poor financial health of FTX.

The GBTC Bitcoin tracker fund has $10.5 billion in assets under management (AUM) and those funds are used to buy and hold Bitcoin. The 72% fall in GBTC over the last 12 months is around 12% more than the fall in BTC.

Cathie Wood's Ark Investment Management has bought another 588,586 shares of GBTC worth about $5.4 million to take advantage of the record discount to Net Asset Value (NAV). The latest purchase of GBTC was added to the asset manager's ARK Next Generation Internet exchange-traded fund (ETF). The fund holds more than six million shares of GBTC, which is 4.84% of the ETF's weighting.

The latest GBTC purchase is the fund's first since 2021 as Wood has moved aggressively to buy the crypto dip. Ark also bought another 245,622 shares of the Coinbase exchange for $12 million, and the Ark Fintech Innovation ETF bought 140,877 shares of Silvergate Capital, a cryptocurrency bank, for $4.4 million.

The fallout from the FTX exchange has expanded to Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust tracker fund. In a recent newsletter, Ark Invest was