ARKW buys GBTC shares for the first time since July 2021.
Cathy Wood could no longer ignore the Crayscale Bitcoin Trust’s record asset discount, and ARK Investment Management acquired more than 315,000 shares of the cryptocurrency fund for ARKW, totaling almost $2.8 million.
GBTC is trading at a discount to its base coins.
The trust, which only invests in bitcoin and is built to monitor its price, is languishing at a nearly unprecedented discount to the value of its underlying cryptocurrency at the time of ARK’s purchases.
The dislocation is a result of a fund structure that forbids exits, which means that shares cannot be destroyed to keep up with shifting demand. Last week, as bitcoin fell in the wake of FTX’s shocking bankruptcy filing, this dynamic worsened the GBTC disparity.
Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that purchasing GBTC at a 40% discount to net asset value would be equivalent to purchasing roughly $11,000’s worth of bitcoin at the current price of $16,400.