(Bloomberg) -- Crypto asset manager Grayscale Investments said it has begun to offer the Grayscale XRP Trust, helping to send the price of the seventh-largest digital asset up by almost 10%.
The trust aims to provide investors the opportunity to gain exposure to the token that powers the XRP Ledger, a distributed, peer-to-peer network created to facilitate cross-border financial transactions, Grayscale said in a statement Thursday. The investment product is available to eligible individual and institutional accredited investors.
Trusts are closed-end investments, meaning that there is a fixed number of shares available. The number of shares can vary in exchange traded funds, usually making those investment products more tradable.
XRP rose as much as 9.8% to around 59 cents, and is down around 8% this year. The seventh-biggest cryptocurrency has an estimated market value of around $32 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Last year, XRP creator Ripple scored a partial victory over the Securities and Exchange Commission when a judge ruled that only sales of the token to institutions, and not to retail users through exchanges, constituted a securities offering. The ruling opened the door to broader availability of XRP for trading.
Grayscale scored a victory against the SEC last year as well, when a court ruled that the agency couldn’t reject the company’s plan for converting its trust into a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. Grayscale offers about two dozen products, investing into various cryptocurrencies.
(Updates with background on Ripple and Grayscale)
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