Revealed: Uncovering Grayscale's $16 billion Bitcoin Trust stash

Onchain detectives from the Arkham Intelligence platform were able to identify the crypto addresses of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), the second-largest Bitcoin (BTC) known holding entity in the world, with over $16 billion in BTC.

With this discovery, reported by Arkham’s official account on September 6, it is now possible for investors to verify Grayscale’s holdings. Before that, people had to trust the company’s public reports, as they refused to share their addresses “due to security concerns”, as stated in a post in November 2022.

According to the findings, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust holdings sum up to 627,779 BTC ($16.14 billion, by press time), spread across over 1,750 different addresses, with each holding no more than 1,000 BTC.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s holdings onchain map. Source: Arkham Intelligence (by Finbold on September 7, at 12 pm UTC)

More on Grayscale’s cryptocurrency holdings

Besides the Bitcoin Trust holdings, Grayscale’s known addresses also hold 29 other cryptocurrencies, for a total of $21.07 billion in digital assets — BTC included.

However, the company only has meaningful holdings in the following 10:

Ethereum (ETH): 3.026 million ETH ($4.93 billion);Chainlink (LINK): 301,488 LINK ($1.88 million);Polygon (MATIC): 3.196 million MATIC ($1.77 million);Uniswap (UNI): 263,888 UNI ($1.17 million);Basic Attention Token (BAT): 5.826 million BAT ($977,030);Maker Protocol (MKR): 338.47 MKR ($383,130);AAVE Procol (AAVE): 4,999 AAVE ($275,320);Synthetix Network (SNX): 91,488 SNX ($213,170);Curve Finance (CRV): 297,523 CRV ($130,250);Avalanche (AVAX): 7,052 AVAX ($69,670).

Other holdings are made of less than $5,000, most of them being small fractions that were most probably unrequested sends to feature the tokens among Grayscale’s addresses on intelligence platforms like Arkham’s.

Grayscale has gained notoriety in the cryptocurrency market as one of the leading crypto assets management firms, currently waiting for a decision from the US SEC about their request to convert the GBTC into a spot Bitcoin ETF.