Grayscale Investments now controls 2.4% of the current BTC supply

Crypto fund manager Grayscale Investments has increased the assets under management in its Bitcoin Trust by more than $180 million over the past week.

According to data from information platform Bybt, Grayscale added 17,100 Bitcoin (BTC) to the firm’s Bitcoin Trust in the last seven days. The company now has 449,900 total coins under management — worth roughly $4.9 billion with the crypto asset at $10,890, closing above $10,000 every day for the last 63 days.

This effectively means Grayscale controls roughly 2.4% of total coin supply — currently at 18,502,381 according to CoinMarketCap — and shows no signs of stopping its buying spree. The total supply of Bitcoin is capped at 21 million, meaning there are roughly 2.5 million BTC left to be mined, or about 11.9% of the total Bitcoin to be generated. Even if the firm were to stop amassing coins now, it would still have control of more than 2% of all Bitcoin in circulation by the time the final block is mined. 

Grayscale is not the only firm seeing the potential of crypto investments. Business intelligence company MicroStrategy has swapped more than $400 million of spare capital from fiat to Bitcoin. The company has reportedly accumulated 38,250 BTC since its first crypto purchase in August; less than a tenth that of Grayscale.

Barry Silbert, CEO of Grayscale, announced in a Sept. 15 tweet — perhaps jokingly for members of Crypto Twitter — that the two companies were in a “buying race” for Bitcoin: 

Apparently there is some kind of bitcoin buying race between MicroStrategy and @Grayscale

Game on

— Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) September 15, 2020

However, token holders do not necessarily need to worry about Grayscale acquiring coins faster than they can be mined. Cointelegraph reported in July that the majority of the investment firm’s crypto purchases came from Bitcoin already in circulation. The firm refers to these purchases as “in kind” exchanges.

Grayscale reported $5.8 billion in assets under management as of Sept. 25, with crypto trusts including Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Horizen (ZEN), Litecoin (LTC), Stellar Lumens (XLM), XRP, and Zcash (ZEC).