Grayscale Investments announced the launch of a new investment fund for Aave’s governance token, AAVE, on Oct. 3.

The Grayscale Aave Trust “offers investors the opportunity to gain exposure to AAVE, the governance token for Aave’s platform,” according to Grayscale.

The fund is available exclusively to qualified investors and is the latest addition to Grayscale’s lineup of single-asset crypto investment products.

In August, Grayscale introduced three other trusts focused on the native protocol tokens of Sky (formerly MakerDAO), Bittensor, and Sui.

Aave is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that “facilitates transparent, decentralized borrowing and lending by utilizing self-executing smart contracts rather than traditional intermediaries,” as described by Grayscale.

As of Oct. 2, Grayscale, the largest crypto fund manager globally, manages approximately $21 billion in assets.

The company is best known for its Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs), including the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE).

Grayscale also operates private single-asset funds for other protocol tokens like Basic Attention Token and Chainlink.

Aave remains DeFi’s leading lending protocol, with nearly $12 billion in total value locked (TVL), according to DefiLlama

In July, Aave tokenholders approved a proposal to update its tokenomics, introducing a mechanism to allocate a portion of the protocol’s revenue to AAVE stakers.

The protocol generates revenue through the liquidation of cryptocurrency-collateralized loans.

The AAVE token has seen a growth of over 110% in the past year, according to CoinMarketCap.

“By leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts, Aave’s decentralized platform aims to optimize lending and borrowing while removing intermediaries and reducing reliance on human judgment,” said Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Grayscale’s head of product and research, in a statement.

In August, Grayscale’s global head of ETFs, Dave LaValle, predicted that the cryptocurrency ETF market will expand to include a broader range of digital assets and diversified crypto indexes.

“We’re going to see more single-asset products, as well as index-based and diversified products,” LaValle said.

Sources:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-launches-aave-investment-fund

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/10/03/2957731/0/en/Grayscale-Investments-Launches-Grayscale-Aave-Trust.html

https://defillama.com/protocol/aave#information

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/aave/