Grayscale’s launch of its first U.S. spot Chainlink Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) attracted powerful interest on its first day of trading, suggesting investors still have appetite for regulated altcoin products despite the broader cryptocurrency market downturn.
The Grayscale Chainlink ETF (LINK) debuted on day one with $41 million in cumulative net inflows and a “robust” $13 million in trading volume, Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, said in a Wednesday X report post. “$41 million came in on day one. Another hit from the cryptocurrency world, the only dud so far was Doge, but it’s still early.”
The debut signals that institutional and professional investors are waiting on the sidelines for more regulated ways to gain exposure to altcoins that can be integrated into corporate or fund strategies.
Related: Ethereum treasury trade declines by 80% as a handful of whales dominate purchases
By comparison, the Solana ETF (SOL) debuted with first-day volume of just $8.2 million, according to Farside Investors data.
According to data from the XRP spot ETF (XRP), it continues to be the leader among altcoin ETFs debuting this year, with first-day inflows of $243 million Soso value.
Related: Bank of America Backs 1-4% Crypto Allocation, Opens Door to Bitcoin ETFs
The Link ETF’s debut was successful, but not a “hit,” says an ETF analyst
While the Chainlink ETF’s debut wasn’t a “blockbuster success,” the fund already has $64 million in total assets with an initial seed allocation of $18 million, ETF analyst James Seyffart wrote in Wednesday’s issue of X post. “The chain shows that longer-tail assets can also succeed in an ETF wrapper.”
In finance, long tail assets refer to less popular and less liquid assets associated with higher risk and reward profiles.
Although the price of the LINK token has increased by 9.8% over the past week, according to Cointelegraph data, the ETF’s debut was unable to reverse the token’s 39% decline over the past year.
LINK is the native utility token of the Chainlink network, used to reward validator node operators and pay for Oracle data delivery services.
Chainlink provides decentralized asset tokenization applications and protocols with reliable real-world data sources for secure and correct astute contract execution.
Chainlink’s Oracle and Crosschain decentralized interoperability services are fundamental to developers building more elaborate decentralized finance (DeFi) projects.
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