Last week, digital asset management firm Osprey Funds, LLC announced that it had launched the world’s first fund offering exposure to the SOL cryptocurrency used on the Solana blockchain.
The Osprey Solana Trust is available to accredited investors and has a minimum investment of $10,000 dollars. The Trust will waive the 2.5% management fee until January 2023. The firm plans to list the fund on the OTCQX market.
According to the Trust’s factsheet, the Coinbase Custody Trust will serve as the Trust’s custodian, holding the SOL in storage. The fund administrator is listed as Theorem Fund Services.
Osprey Funds CEO Greg King told Blockworks that the firm has “been focused on launching first-to-market funds that track what we think are promising Layer 1 protocols. Solana is a great example of that [with its] extremely fast transaction speed.”
Solana is indeed the fastest blockchain in the world, processing 65,000 transactions per second. The Ethereum network, by contrast, can only handle about 30 transactions per second.
This fast transaction speed means that Solana’s fees are much lower than rivals like Ethereum, where users have been hit with thousands of dollars in fees at particularly busy times for the network. Solana’s fees have been trending at around $0.001, even as more users log on.
SOL, Solana’s cryptocurrency, reached an all-time high of $214.36 last Thursday, up a stunning 13,200% since the beginning of the year, when a single SOL token was valued at $1.61.
SOL now has a market cap of around $58 billion, making it the sixth-largest cryptocurrency in the world.
Experts told Forbes that Solana’s rise is largely due to crypto gaming and NFTs on Solana gaining popularity after years of development. FTX’s announcement that its NFT marketplace will allow users to trade NFTs using both Solana and Ethereum also likely provided an additional boost.
The Solana Trust is Osprey’s fourth product launch this year after the Osprey Bitcoin Trust (OBTC), the Osprey Polkadot Trust, and the Osprey Algorand Trust.
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