Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein steps down

Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein is stepping down after more than a decade at the investment firm. He will be succeeded by Peter Mintzberg in August, who is the current Global Head of Strategy for Goldman Sachs' Asset and Wealth Management division.

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre and Julie Hyman break down Sonnenshein's instrumental role in Grayscale and the future of its bitcoin ETF (GBTC).

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Asking for a Trend.

This post was written by Melanie Riehl

Video transcript

Ceo Michael Sonnenschein is stepping down after more than a decade at the firm, he'll be replaced in August by Peter Mintzberg, who currently serves as the global head of strategy for Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management division.

And there will be an interim actually, Michael Sonenshein stepping down immediately, there'll be an interim person in that place until August.

Now.

For years, gray scales, Bitcoin Trust was one of the few ways to play crypto without buying tokens directly and grayout was one of the first firms to launch a spot.

Bitcoin ETF once it secured SEC approval in January, but it has seen an investor exodus as of late.

Let's get to Jared.

It's been a long day, Jared with more in today's start of the day.

Thank you, Julie.

Um You know, I don't want to gloss over Michael Sonenshein leaving the firm because he presided over some really bell weather events.

His regulatory strategy was to to the SEC after they denied the conversion of that G BT C into a spot, Bitcoin ETF because it was a closed end fund and it, the price had become detached from Bitcoin fundamentals.

That is a Bitcoin prices.

So all in all we did see this rash, this rush of Bitcoin spot.

Bitcoin ETS come to market in the middle of January.

And these are the flows.

Now, we had about seven or eight.

Don't quote me on that.

And these are only the top ones.

But what you're going to note is gray scale.

They've lost $17.5 billion in flows there.

And that's, that directly eats into their fees.

But it's precisely because they have higher fees than the rest of the market that a lot of that exodus has occurred.

And the principal beneficiary has been Black Rock I ETF and that's IBIT.

That's a ticker there.

And if you were to compare the total assets, that would be 18.5 for Blackrock, that's 18 and billion in their IBID fund versus 19.5 for Gray scale.

So all in all, you got these two guys pretty much operating on par now and it's an incredible race.

There was this thought that Boomers were going to load up their 401k s with Bitcoin ETF that has not materialized.

And so I think what we've seen now in the price of Bitcoin is the slow realization that the spot Bitcoin ETF.

And this is a year to day chart was a big moment for Bitcoin A TF.

It wasn't enough to carry it through and continue that slate of that slate of record highs.

We did produce new nominal highs there.

But if you look at the five year chart, these were not that much higher than the highs we saw before.

So Bitcoin may be just putting in this pattern of slightly higher highs without that huge surge that people had hoped for.

Um, we'll continue to watch G BT C to see if there's any changes to their fees and therefore a reversal.