Grayscale launches Lido, Optimism investment funds

Grayscale Investments launched two new investment funds for Lido and Optimism’s governance tokens, LDO and OP, the asset manager said on Dec. 12. 

Grayscale Lido DAO Trust and Grayscale Optimism Trust offer exposure to the native tokens of Ethereum’s largest liquid staking token (LST) protocol and one of its most popular layer-2 (L2) scaling solutions, respectively. 

“Lido is helping to democratize staking on Ethereum, and Optimism is critical in allowing Ethereum to scale to compete with newer, faster layer 1 blockchains,“ Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Grayscale’s head of product and research, said in a statement.

The trusts are designed to offer investors “exposure to protocols helping to increase Ethereum’s efficiency, security, scalability, and adoption within the broader DeFi ecosystem,” Sharif-Askary said. 

Lido is an LST protocol issuing tradeable tokens representing claims on an underlying pool of staked Ether (ETH). It currently touts nearly $40 billion in total value locked (TVL), making Lido the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol by TVL, according to DefiLlama.

Optimism is a popular L2 network with approximately $800 million in TVL, according to DefiLlama. 

Its technology stack is used by other L2s, including Coinbase’s Base and Uniswap’s Unichain, creating a network of interlinked L2s Optimism dubs the “superchain.”

Source: Grayscale

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Expanding suite of crypto funds

The funds, which are only available to qualified investors, add to Grayscale’s suite of single-asset crypto investment products. 

In October, Grayscale launched an investment fund for Aave’s governance token, AAVE. 

It also added 35 crypto altcoins, including Dogecoin, Worldcoin, Pyth and Rune, to a list of assets that are “under consideration” for future investment products. 

In August, Grayscale launched three trusts to invest in the native protocol tokens of Sky (previously MakerDAO), Bittensor and Sui, respectively.

Grayscale is the world’s largest crypto fund manager, with nearly $35 billion in assets under management as of Dec. 11, according to Grayscale.

It is best known for its Bitcoin (BTC) and ETH exchange-traded funds (ETFs), including Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE).

United States regulators are mulling permitting Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC), which holds a diverse portfolio of cryptocurrencies, as an ETF.

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