A mysterious company popped up in the US state of Delaware. But is Grayscale behind that?
LINKies unite
Someone set up a Chainlink (LINK) product under the guise of a Grayscale Investments offering last month, documents from company directory Bizapedia showed.
Neither did Grayscale or Chainlink make any comment, but given the fast rise of LINK and its increasing use case in the past year, a ‘Grayscale Chainlink Trust’ product may not be such a far-fetched idea either.
The news did, however, help the Chainlink ‘marines,’ get charged up on the news, and rightfully so.
Grayscale Chainlink Trust (LINK)
Filed on December 18th, 2020 as a Delaware Domestic Statutory Trust
Is it real or just an elaborate larp? Only time will tellhttps://t.co/ej4bYWysYz#Chainlink $LINK pic.twitter.com/bLZP5Jnwvw
— ChainLinkGod.eth (@ChainLinkGod) January 21, 2021
Chainlink is the world’s largest oracle service. Oracles are third-party tools that fetch data from outside a blockchain to within it, as blockchains are a means of iron-clad storage and immutability but cannot verify the quality of data going inside them.
This means that bad data can register itself on the blockchain, causing a host of problems and millions of dollars in losses. Chainlink helps avoid this, while additionally also being capable of being an efficient payment system itself.
As per CryptoSlate’s DeFi page, Chainlink has a current market cap of over $8.4 billion and currently trades at $20.6, witnessing a 6% price gain after suffering a broader sell-off in the cryptocurrency market yesterday.
How Chainlink would feature in Grayscale
Grayscale is the world’s largest crypto asset manager and investment platform. It holds over $25.5 billion worth of various cryptocurrencies (mainly Bitcoin) over nine “trusts.” Its products are some of the only regulated crypto-offerings to trade on public markets in the US.
How Grayscale’s products work is like this: the asset manager ties up with a custodian (such as Coinbase) to hold a certain amount of cryptocurrency tied to that “trust” share. Investors can then either subscribe (with a six-month lock-in) or purchase those shares on the open market.
Investors make money along with the growth of their holdings. As the value of the underlying crypto rises, the price of the trust share rises. And for the legally compliant service, Grayscale charges a sizable premium in the range of 10% to as much as 200%.
A Chainlink trust would work in a similar manner. Grayscale would hold a fixed amount of LINK per share, and accredited investors would be able to purchase it via regulated OTC brokers in the US.
