Arkham Intelligence, an on-chain analytics platform, said it had traced Grayscale’s Bitcoin holdings across the blockchain and confirmed the entity to be the second-largest holder of BTC.
Breaking: Arkham has identified the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s holdings on chain.
It is the 2nd largest BTC entity globally, holding >$16B of BTC.
Though Grayscale publicly reports balances, they have refused to identify the on-chain addresses of the trust. https://t.co/uEN4kNldpm pic.twitter.com/p9GfrthoKR
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) September 6, 2023
In an X post on Wednesday, Arkham claimed to have identified more than 1,750 addresses belonging to the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), each of which contained less than 1,000 BTC.
“Though Grayscale publicly reports balances, they have refused to identify the on-chain addresses of the trust,” stated Arkham, referring to a November tweet from Grayscale, where the firm declined to provide its on-chain wallet information citing security concerns.
Arkham’s platform shows that Grayscale holds 627,779 BTC, which currently amounts to over $16 billion. The reported figure is also in line with what Grayscale claims is GBTC’s current assets under management on its website.
Grayscale has been pushing to convert GBTC into a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). After winning a lawsuit against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week, the firm is now seeking a meeting with the securities regulator to make its case for why its application should be approved.
In a letter addressed to the SEC on Tuesday, Grayscale’s lawyers said that the court of appeals ruling made it clear that “there is no available rationale that would distinguish a bitcoin futures ETP from a spot bitcoin ETP” as the Commission had previously argued.
Meanwhile, the SEC has delayed its decision on six other spot Bitcoin ETF applications to October. The list of applicants includes BlackRock, Fidelity WisdomTree, Bitwise, VanEck, Invesco Galaxy and Valkyrie.
