Grayscale launches solana trust as the ethereum competitor rides an over 10,000% gain in 2021

• Grayscale Investments is launching a product that will solely and passively invest in solana

• The move comes as the crypto sees an eye-popping 10,000% rally since the start of 2021.
• The fund is available to individual and institutional investors with an investment minimum of $25,000 and an annual fee of 2.5%.

Grayscale Investments is launching a product that will solely and passively invest in solana to ride on the eye-popping gains the cryptocurrency has seen since the beginning of the year.

The Grayscale Solana Trust, the 16th investment vehicle from the world's largest digital currency asset manager, is available to individual and institutional investors.

It will be similar to Grayscale's other single-asset investment trusts, including ones that provide exposure to bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, and litecoin, among others. The Solana Trust has an investment minimum of $25,000 and an annual fee of 2.5%.

Solana, a layer-one protocol, is widely viewed as a competitor to fellow smart-contract platform ethereum, which has been plagued by high fees and slow transactions.

Its native token, also called solana, is now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of over $64 billion and has returned more than 10,000% year-to-date.

"Solana is faster and cheaper, so it's been a really great on-ramp for folks looking to buy NFTs, DeFi, or various applications being built on top of it," Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein told Insider.

He added: "We are really seeing it as a platform where the users can learn, experiment, and build in a way that is perhaps more cost-effective than some other blockchain networks like ethereum."

In November, solana also became the third asset to have a standalone price tracker in the Bloomberg terminal after bitcoin and ethereum, the two largest crypto assets by market cap. Bloomberg partnered with Galaxy Digital to launch the Bloomberg Galaxy Solana Index.

Solana's rapid ascent may also be attributed to the support of heavyweights such as Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of crypto exchange FTX, who has in the past said solana has the capacity for mass adoption.

Grayscale Investments, founded in 2013, had more than $50 billion in assets under management as of November 26.