Grayscale Investments bought another 16,244 bitcoins on Monday, making it the company’s biggest single-day purchase ever, estimated to be worth just short of $600 million.
This latest acquisition from Grayscale follows news last week that they bought 4,790 bitcoins in their first two days of opening since the Christmas break.
In only 4 days of operations since opening, therefore, the investment fund has bought 37,278 bitcoins at an aggregate price of around $750 million – an equivalent of over 41 days of the newly mined bitcoins.
The growth in Grayscale over the last 12 months has been phenomenal. Since January 2020, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) has grown from $1.8 billion to today’s valuation of $22.96 billion.
Of course, the value of GBTC has benefitted from the rise in the Bitcoin price, but that isn’t the full picture.
According to Grayscale’s Q4 2020 report, capital inflows into Grayscale products surpassed $5.7 billion in 2020 alone, more than four times the $1.2 billion invested in its Digital Asset products in the time since its inception.
Judging by Grayscale aggressively upping its Bitcoin acquisition, we can assume its reflected in institutional and high net worth individuals’ interest in Bitcoin.
If it was ever in doubt, we can determine from the rise of Bitcoin ‘whale wallets’ to be another measure for the growing interest in Bitcoin.
A Bitcoin ‘whale wallet’ is any Bitcoin address with at least 1000 bitcoins in, which at today’s cost would be worth at least $36 million.
According to Glassnode, the amount of Bitcoin whale wallets increased to an all-time high of 2140 wallets, a rise of over 25% since the start of 2020.
Added with the likes of MicroStrategy, MassMutual, and Guggenheim Investments all making large moves into the Bitcoin market, the interest in Bitcoin from the bigger players is clear for everyone to see.
It’s institutional game theory playing out, and the more they demand exposure to Bitcoin, the more bigger money will flood the space.
Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal called it last year, when he said a ‘wall of money’ was coming, and we can see by Grayscale’s aggressive buying they are getting the large amounts from somewhere.
Bitcoin Game Theory Is Playing Out With Governments
It’s not just institutional game theory playing out, we are seeing it at state level, too. Only last week it was announced that the Pakistan government was funding two Bitcoin mining farms in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.
News emerged yesterday that the Iranian government had seized over 45,000 mining devices. While this is tragic for the miners involved, the Iranian government recently funded a large mining operation itself.
At the time, Tehran announced it was funding the mining farm, the government also issued licences for anyone wanting to mine. The recently seized devices are thought to be from unlicensed miners. I wonder what the Iranian government will do with those mining rigs.
With an abundance of cheap energy, Venezuela is also thought to be involved in the mining game. The Venezuelan army created its own mining farm, all with the backing of the government, saying at the time it was to help generate ‘unblockcable income’ and get around US sanctions.
There’s no evidence of any government adding Bitcoin to their treasuries, but it’s hard to believe not one government is accumulating Bitcoin.
Governments can basically print money to buy Bitcoin. Easy. It might seem far fetched, but why wouldn’t a corrupt (they all are) government from a struggling economy print their way out of trouble and stack some sats just in case Bitcoin becomes something? My guess is some are.
Pablo is a writer at Bitcoin Maximalist. Originally from Spain, Pablo grew up in the UK, and loves clubbing and gaming. Pablo is a keen Bitcoiner and loves to share his wisdom to help spread the good news of Bitcoin.
