Share this article
Grayscale Unveils DeFi Fund Linked to New CoinDesk Index
The new fund joins a growing number of offerings seeking to help investors easily bet on growth in decentralized finance (DeFi).
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 1:27 p.m. Published Jul 19, 2021, 12:17 p.m.
Grayscale, the largest cryptocurrency investment manager, said Monday it has started a fund focused on decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, based on a new DeFi-specific index produced by CoinDesk’s TradeBlock division.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
The companies, both subsidiaries of CoinDesk parent Digital Currency Group (DCG), wrote in a joint press release the Grayscale DeFi Fund provides “exposure to a selection of industry-leading DeFi protocols through a market-capitalization weighted portfolio.” The idea is that investors can allocate money toward DeFi without having to buy the tokens directly.
DeFi, which consists of blockchain-based software protocols designed for the trading and lending of cryptocurrencies, is one of the fastest-growing segments of the digital-asset industry. The amount of collateral locked into the protocols has increased 19-fold over the past year to about $50 billion, and prices for many of the platforms’ associated tokens have soared.
"Based on the user adoption that we're seeing around DeFi and DeFi protocols, we do think the future of this area is bright," Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said in an interview Monday on CoinDesk TV's First Mover program.
The fund is only open to “eligible individual and institutional accredited investors,” according to the press release. Grayscale said it “intends to attempt to have shares of this new product quoted on a secondary market” but added that “there is no guarantee this will be successful.”
The CoinDesk DeFi Index is a new product from TradeBlock, one of the first firms to develop an index for professional investors to track bitcoin when it launched the XBX Index in 2014. CoinDesk announced its purchase of TradeBlock for an undisclosed sum in January.
The new index joins a growing list of offerings designed to help investors track prices for DeFi tokens and invest in them. Last month, the technology firm Amun launched two new crypto token products, the DeFi Index Token and DeFi Momentum Index.
The cryptocurrency data firm Messari has a dedicated screening tool tracking 164 DeFi tokens. The average price of the tokens is up 395% this year, versus 8.3% for bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, and 160% for No. 2 ether.
According to the press release, the CoinDesk DeFi index aims to provide a “broad-based, benchmark representation of DeFi protocols,” with assets weighted by their market capitalization.
As of July 1, 2021, the CoinDesk DeFi Index consisted of the following assets, with their market-capitalization-based weightings:
- Uniswap , 49.95%
- Aave , 10.25%
- , 8.38%
- Curve (CRV), 7.44%
- MakerDAO (MKR), 6.49%
- SushiSwap (SUSHI), 4.83%
- , 4.43%
- Yearn Finance (YFI), 3.31%
- UMA Protocol (UMA), 2.93%
- , 2.00%
UPDATE (13:19 UTC): This story has been updated to include a comment from Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Filecoin Trades Little Changed, Underperforms Wider Crypto Markets
The token has major support at the $1.36 level and resistance at $1.40.
What to know:
- Filecoin slipped 0.2% to $1.37 over the last 24 hours.
- Trading volume was 29% above weekly averages as institutional flows accelerated.
Top Stories
