Grayscale launches crypto trust based on the DeFi protocol token Maker

What’s new? Crypto investment company Grayscale launched a closed-end fund Grayscale MakerDAO Trust, which will allow selected individual and institutional investors to get access to the governance token of the decentralized credit platform MakerDAO (MKR). Following the news, the asset added 9% overnight to reach $2154, its highest level since the beginning of last week.

Press release

What else is known? Maker is one of the largest decentralized financial protocols (DeFi). The project, based on the Ethereum blockchain, is managed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which includes MKR holders. With these coins, participants can make suggestions for protocol improvements and vote in favor or against their implementation.

Maker manages over $7 billion in cryptocurrencies and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), including US Treasuries, according to DeFiLlama data, and also issues the $5 billion-capitalized DAI algorithmic stablecoin. This ranks DAI as the 22nd overall cryptocurrency and third in the stablecoin rankings behind Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC.

In March, Maker founder Rune Christensen revealed details of the Endgame upgrade, which aims to increase the decentralization of DAI. Its first phase involves the release of upgraded versions of MKR and DAI. Users will be able to upgrade their coins at will, which will expand their ability to stake and farm yields within the ecosystem.

Grayscale also acts as an issuer of bitcoin and Ethereum-based spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The products, which trade under the tickers GBTC and ETHE on the NYSE, have experienced outflows since launch, which have now reached $19,49 billion and $2,33 billion, respectively. One of the reasons was the management fees: for GBTC it is 1,5% and for ETHE it is 2,5%, which is much higher compared to its competitors in the crypto-ETF industry.

In this regard, the company also launched mini-trusts under the tickers BTC and ETH on the same NYSE, which offer the lowest commissions in the industry: 0,15% each.

In addition, Grayscale has other cryptocurrency funds, including Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC), whose basket includes bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP and Avalanche, and Grayscale Smart Contract Platform Ex-Ethereum Fund (GSCPxE), whose basket includes Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot and Polygon.

In May, the company announced the launch of two crypto trusts with a focus on a single token. The first gave accredited investors access to the Bitcoin-based Layer 2 (L2) Stacks network coin, while the second offered access to the token of the high-performance L1 blockchain NEAR Protocol.

Last month, Grayscale launched a fund that gave investors access to tokens of AI-based decentralized crypto protocols. The Grayscale Decentralized AI Fund basket included coins from the Bittensor (TAO), Filecoin (FIL), Livepeer (LPT), Render (RNDR) and NEAR projects.

In early August, Grayscale announced the launch of two more funds: for the TAO token and the Sui (SUI) native blockchain coin.

As for the Grayscale MakerDAO Trust, it has the same structure as the firm's other single-asset trusts — it is a closed-end fund where direct withdrawals are not possible. This can lead to price deviations between the fund's units in secondary markets and the underlying asset.