Investors Add $74M to Crypto-Focused Valkyrie Trusts

Valkyrie, an alternative investment firm that had $1.2 billion in assets under management at the end of the second quarter, has added $73.6 million in fresh capital to two of its crypto-focused trusts, according to amended filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The older of the two funds was launched last year, but the recent growth indicates that investors have continued to flow into the crypto industry despite the bear market.

The Valkyrie Tron Trust, which gives accredited investors access to the TRX (TRX) cryptocurrency, has now raised just shy of $50 million, up from a paltry $57 in sales in July 2021.

The Valkyrie Avalanche Trust, offering exposure to the AVAX (AVAX) token, first appeared in an SEC filing in January, but the first sale had yet to occur. The trust has now raised nearly $24 million, falling a bit short of the $25 million that Valkyrie said in May that it had lined up for the then-newly announced trust.

“Tron has gained significant traction because the Tron network continues to see continued transaction growth, including for stablecoins, and investors familiar with the Asia-Pacific region have started taking notice,” a Valkyrie spokesperson told CoinDesk in an email. “Avalanche is also seeing increased adoption at a substantial rate, including earlier this week when KKR announced a deal with Securitize to tokenize a piece of a private equity fund on the Avalanche blockchain.”

Nashville, Tenn.-based Valkyrie offers six protocol-focused trusts, a decentralized finance (DeFi) hedge fund, three Nasdaq-listed exchange-traded funds (ETF) and a protocol treasury management business. In May, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved Valkyrie’s XBTO Bitcoin Futures Fund. Two months later, the firm announced its move into venture capital with a planned $30 million fund focused on early-stage startups in Israel.

Valkyrie closed an $11 million strategic funding round in July backed by traditional finance heavyweights BNY Mellon and Wedbush. The firm said the funding was driven more by the strategic partnerships than the capital.

Read more: Investment Giant KKR Puts Portion of Private Equity Fund on Avalanche Blockchain

UPDATE (Sept. 16, 2022 UTC 12:08): Updates the type of investors in the second paragraph and number of protocols trusts in the sixth paragraph.