As a sign of how tightly interwoven the relationships are at the cryptocurrency investor, the Digital Currency Group invested $772 million of funds that were borrowed from one of its subsidiaries, Genesis, in another of its subsidiaries, Grayscale’s GBTC. GBTC is now being traded at around $9.23.
Shares in Grayscale’s Bitcoin investment fund are denoted with the ticker symbol GBTC. Grayscale is another one of DCG’s subsidiaries, just like Genesis. Therefore, we are dealing with an intercompany transfer much to the ones that occur between FTX and Alameda.
DCG does not have the same level of public prominence as exchanges like FTX or Binance; yet, it is one of the largest and early investors in a cryptocurrency market that is still suffering from the failure of Sam Bankman-FTX Fried’s earlier this month.
This most recent disclosure brings to light the connections that exist across Silbert’s organization, which was estimated to be worth $10 billion by investors in 2018, including SoftBank, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, and Google’s venture arm CapitalG.
The price of GBTC has been going down for some time now. It would thus seem that DCG has been borrowing money from Genesis in order to purchase huge quantities of GBTC in an effort to maintain the price of the cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency specialist Finance Cassandra is pessimistic about the future implications of this development.
Furthermore, Genesis Trading has been trying to generate funds since since it stopped allowing withdrawals from its lending section a week ago, claiming extreme market turbulence as the reason. It said earlier this week that there was no chance of an immediate bankruptcy, but since then, it has recruited investment bankers from Moelis to assist in examining all of the company’s alternatives.
