Solana Staked ETF Launched!!!🚨XRP Next?🔥Grayscale INTERVIEW

The Grayscale Solana Trust ETF, with the ticker symbol GSOL, launched on NYSE Arca on Wednesday. Canary also listed its Litecoin ETF and HBAR ETF on Nasdaq on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Solana's recent partnership with Western Union has the XRP loyalists questioning it's current dominance.

~This Episode is sponsored by SALT~
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GUEST: Zach Pandl, Head of Research, Grayscale Investments
Grayscale Solana Staked ETF ➜ https://bit.ly/GSOLgrayscale
Grayscale Top 5 ETF ➜ https://bit.ly/GDLCgrayscale

00:00 intro
00:07 Sponsor: SALT
00:30 Grayscale $GSOL Launches!
02:01 Institutional Staking Rewards
07:00 Western Union Chooses Solana
07:46 Western Union dumped XRP
08:11 Big Stablecoin Win For Solana
11:04 XRP vs Solana Drama
11:28 TikTok: XRP Army vs Solana Soldiers
12:32 SWIFT + Visa + Western Union
12:54 Why didn't XRP ETF Launch?
14:38 ETF inflow Expectations
16:42 Grayscale Top 5 ETF
18:40 Will Solana flip XRP?
20:15 A.I. vs Stablecoins
21:44 Larry Fink: World Isn't Prepared
22:40 Tokenized Assets Potential
24:00 outro

#Crypto #XRP #Solana
~Solana Staked ETF Launched!!!🚨XRP Next?🔥Grayscale INTERVIEW~
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Big week for Solana as GSOL launches. This is an
ETF that has been highly anticipated. We'll break it all
down for you. Let's just get started. I do want
to thank our sponsor today, that is salt Lending. You
guys can go out there and get your own crypto
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(00:21):
got this new program called salt Shield. This of course
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Use our link down below to get started. All right,
let's get into it today. I want to bring back
Zach Pandel, who is the head of research over at
Greyscale Investments. Great to have you back to Zach.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
How are you hey, Paul, Great to see you virtually
doing great, excellent.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
So a couple of points we got to talk about,
of course, is the big news and that is g SOL.
It's on the ground and running. You guys have a
lot going on here with it. When you look at
the Solana ETF as it is launched. Now, explain to
our viewers and our listeners what this really means for Grayscale.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Well, first off, we are excited to have this ETF
product in market today. We've been running this investment vehicle
since twenty twenty one. So Greyscale starts these products out
for accredited investors as a private funds. This is sort
of their caterpillar stage, if you will, and today is

(01:21):
when it reaches its final mature butterfly stage as an ETF.
So what it means for investors, We've been able to
offer investors access to Solana for a number of years already,
but we're able to offer them in this most efficient
product structure, the ETF product structure that has the broadest
investor access and generally is preferred by our clients. And

(01:44):
so that's what it really means is, you know, we've
been able to offer Solana and been excited about this
ecosystem for a long time now because of the regulatory
clarity that we've been getting that we've talked about on
your show, we're able to bring it to market as
an ETF.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
It's a great outcome for investors out there.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
One thing, of course, that is even bigger was the
institutional staking rewards. We were showing that on screen. You
guys are going to deliver exposure to Saul. This is
the native soaken over on Solana. But what you're talking
about is staking rewards that have historically averaged between six
and eight percent per year. This is a creative to
the g soul's total return potential. How does this work?

(02:23):
How are you staking? What providers are you using? Can
you go into that detail?

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Bitcoin, as people know, doesn't have this yield or this
reward from staking from the product itself that is sort
of earned by external providers called the minors. But in
the proof of steak category, which includes Ethereum, which includes
a Solana token, holders can earn an extra reward on

(02:49):
top of their token by providing a service to the blockchain.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
So you're doing something active.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
You are staking your tokens, putting your economic capital at
risk and validating transactions on the blockchain, helping service the blockchain,
and earning a kind of reward income in exchange for
that service. So it's both something that's good for the
blockchain and good for the investors because it provides an

(03:16):
additional reward on top of your tokens. And if you're
not staking, essentially you're leaving return on the table, so
very important that we're able to offer these stake and
rewards in our g sol product for Solana as well
as in our Ethereum ETFs today.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Zach, how has this particular ETF performed versus what we've
seen with the bitcoin and the ETFs for you guys.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Well just day one, so I think too early to
say in terms of things like flows and volume and
investor uptake. But the Salona product has been one of
our most popular private trusts while it's and I think
it will again be very successful in this ETF format
in general. Although it's not a kind of perfect comparison,
I do think that market cap is a rough guide

(04:03):
for how much investor interest there will be in these
different types of products.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
So it won't be as much as bitcoin.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Bitcoin is a more than two trillion dollar asset, so
we should expect a bit more scaled down demand compared
to that. But Solana a really critical piece of the
blockchain ecosystem or the crypto economy however you want to
refer to it, and I think it will see high
investor interest as well.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
I know you guys have a lot of other ets.
We'll talk about the xrp ETF in a second, but
before we go there, in terms of the staking unlock,
what are we talking about here, what could be an
exposure for especially around the potential here for earnings.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Well, so Solana has a native staking reward rate that
is around seven percent if we just look at the
last several months. Of course, it fluctuates up and down
with network demand. When the network is acquieter, you know,
when there's fewer transactions, fewer users, that can be a
little bit lower than that, and when the demand is

(05:02):
running high, the stake and war rate can be even
higher than seven percent. So today we're staking about three
quarters of the fund, and there's a potential to stake
one hundred percent of the fund at some point. So
today earning around a six percent reward rate in this product,

(05:22):
so enhancing the returns. If the price of Soul doesn't
move at all, the underlying investor can expect to receive
that roughly six percent return. So that that's why it's
so important. Even if your token's not moving in price,
you're earning on your position.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, and this has been a big deal that a
lot of people have been anticipating would be coming to
these ETFs now it's here, So kudos to you and
your team for getting this don in a time when
we've had a government shutdown. So I don't know what
kind of magic you guys pulled off there.

Speaker 4 (05:56):
But.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Very good attorneys I think is the key to keep
these things moving even while parts of the government are
not in motion. But yeah, credit credit to greyscale legal
team for pulling these feats off.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
So on the staking side, is this a plan to
just kind of feather this out through different staking services
like a Geto, Soul, et cetera. Or will this be
something that you guys are building out a staking product?
What does that look like for Greyscale?

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Well, I think you know both and is typically the
answer with these things, And I think you know feathering
it out and that's not a bad way to describe it.
So today we are staking in the Ethereum and Solana products.
Greyscale offers you know, more than three dozen different types
of crypto investment products, most of which have some type
of staking feature, and we are working closely with regulators

(06:48):
to make sure that we can stake in those products
effectively for investors and safely as well. So I think
you will see much more of this throughout our whole
product a suite, both in the private fund side of
our business as well as ETFs as we launch more
of those, which I think will be relatively soon.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
All right, So other news that happened this week, of course,
was Western Union was big news for Solana. I want
to go to a clip and then I want to
get your opinion on how this might affect maybe investors
looking at Solana going forward.

Speaker 5 (07:21):
Let's go to some one if your Western Union and
you're already moving one hundred.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
Billion dollars a year across border.

Speaker 5 (07:28):
Kicking a partner that does exactly that fast, efficient, stable
and secure is really really important. And so we went
and looked at most of the other alternatives and came
to the conclusion for an institutional use case like ours,
the Salona blockchain was the right choice for us.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
All right.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
So you see Western Union they're talking about this. They've
been testing a variety of things over the years. They
were even on an early test in twenty eighteen with
XRP that got dumped. But I guess at that time
Solana wasn't really in the picture, but that now they are.
How does this change the narrative for Solana for this

(08:09):
particular partnership.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Well, first off, let me say a no brainer from
Western Union's standpoint. You know, you have stable coins are
the future of digital payments, digital dollars on blockchains, and
stable coin use in some sense will lift all boats
in the crypto ecosystem to almost almost all boats, let's say,

(08:32):
so all the smart contract platforms and different to blockchains,
whether it's Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and many others will benefit
from stable coin. A great sign for Western Union and
in my view, kind of a no brainer to be honest,
given where the industry is going, the payments industry is
going over time, looks it's a big win for Solona

(08:53):
to have this brand name that already owns a lot
of the relevant relationship. You know, this is about using
new technology to manage their existing processes and their existing
relationships with customers that need to make cross border payments,
that need to send remittances, that sort of thing. So
it's a great win for Solana. I think you will

(09:15):
see more of this for Solona. It is a good
blockchain for this use case and many other excellent use cases.
And this is you know why it's so important to
bring these ETFs to market, and I think you will
see other blockchains also participate in the success of stable coins,
including the sum that you've mentioned. So I think of

(09:36):
it as a win for Solona, but also a lift
all boats sort of trend for the crypto industry.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
As you guys know, and I think everybody watching our show,
the banking industry is pretty much held hostage the off ramp,
you know, for anybody out there. So that's been a
big problem with being able to get crypto to critical
mask and escape velocity. Maybe now we're going to get there.
Do you think these kinds of businesses, especially on Western Union,
which has been a legacy business, now starting to transact

(10:04):
in stable coins. But if in reality everybody's got a
global digital wallet that can transact in stable coins anyway,
does that make that kind of business kind of obsolete
in the future.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
I do think it's reasonable to say that, you know,
Western Union is sort of guarding their flank here a
little bit. You know, they have an existing cross border
payments business and they're seeing competition from stable coins. So
if you can't beat them, join them. Kind of philosophy
seems to be what they're doing, and that makes a
lot of sense to me. But I do think it's

(10:36):
reasonable to ask that question, you know, to what extent
do you need these same sort of in person services
when you have other types of on ramps, other types
of wallets. I think that there will be a lasting
use case to some degree because of the cash economy,
which may require in person presence in all of these
different countries, and maybe that's where Western Union has an edge.

(10:59):
But absolutely seeing competition from stable coins and so I
think wisely deciding why not join in.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
That of course, has created a huge backlash between two
major I will call them cults when it comes to
the crypto because there's these factions. I feel like we're
in hunger games sometimes, and that is between the XRP
army and the Solana soldiers. I want to play a
clip real quick for you. This is on TikTok. Take

(11:28):
a look.

Speaker 6 (11:30):
Dak Rector says that x RP ETFs live this week,
maybe even tomorrow.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
Live this week. You heard it here first part out
of nowhere.

Speaker 6 (11:37):
Those three get approved, but then XRP still delayed and the.

Speaker 4 (11:41):
Gigs sorry XRP holders. The delusion with XRP is is crazy.

Speaker 6 (11:49):
It is so over for XRP.

Speaker 4 (11:51):
Guys.

Speaker 6 (11:51):
Western Union build exclusively on Solana, not with Ripple, not
with XRP. This is a basic fact. That's just a fact.
That's not my opinion.

Speaker 4 (12:01):
Western Union isn't going quietly into the night.

Speaker 6 (12:05):
There is no bridge currency. There are stable coins on Solana.
You guys know XRP. That's its main mission is to
be the bridge currency. Now, is this going to be
like the Drake and Kendrick beef.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
At dump on October tenth? Fucking wiped everybody and they.

Speaker 4 (12:23):
Are consistently dumping nine figures a year of it on you.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
It's actually embarrassing.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
But that's the kind of crypto scenarios that play out
in this world, and we have to cover it. You
look at all the narratives that have been pushed out there.
Swift didn't pick up XRP. They went to the ethereum route.
Western Union did't pick up XRP because they're old and outdated.
I'm talking about Western Union. Visa didn't pick up XRP
because they want to control the world. You know, the

(12:50):
way I look at it, Why have we not seen
the XRP ETF launch. What was the reason that Soul
went first and xrp's ETF did not.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Absolutely, it's a relatively simple answer to that question, and
it's just that issuers like Grayscale were a bit further
along with regulators on Solana than on several of the
other potential crypto ETF products at the time of the
government shutdown, and as soon as the government reopens, we

(13:21):
expect to be moving quite quickly on the rest of
these tokens. Crypto definitely has all blockchains have passionate communities
of supporters, and it's one of the things that I
love about the industry is just how enthusiastic people are
about the possibilities of each of these distinct pieces of technology.

(13:43):
I come at this industry and this asset class from
the standpoint of just investment markets in general, and I
believe that it is quite reasonable to have many crypto
assets in your portfolio and hold a diversified basket of
these ass that's we are proud to bring a Solana
et P ETF to market. We're going to be proud

(14:06):
to bring several other of these to market, including XRP,
and we're happy to give investors our own views on
things like valuation and fundamental trends over time, but it
doesn't need to be necessarily one or the other. And certainly,
you know, we are you know, we are working with
all of these different projects over over time. So we're

(14:26):
happy to kind of support the ecosystem and give investors
some sensible guidance about portfolio construction and leave some of
the tribalism to other community members.

Speaker 7 (14:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
Well, the tribalism is out there for sure, Okay, Zach,
I want to go to this tweet right here. This
was one that I put out. It was in reference
to JP Morgan's estimates around all coin ETFs, and they're forecast.
They were estimating on XRP eight billion in inflow, Solona
around six billion inflow. There's some big opportunities here between
these two specifically, First of all, do you think that

(15:00):
is in order what JP Morgan is saying.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
I think those are the right ballpark.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
You know, we're going to find out, of course, these
are new products and we're going to see what market
demand is. I do think that they will be very popular,
but we can absolutely scale to some rough sense to
the bitcoin and ethereum ETFs which we have here in
the US. Market as well as to the old coin
ETPs that exist in Europe. So you know, this is

(15:26):
about US regulatory clarity and change in US products, but
we do have these types of products in other areas
and we can kind of roughly benchmark these estimates. I
think that those are potentially the right ballpark.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
You know. I don't want to say for sure.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
It's day one for our product here today, so we're
going to see after the first few days of trading.
But I think these numbers are approximately scaled to the
experience of the bitcoin and ethereum ETF and seem maybe
in the right ballpark to my eye.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
Well, I was just kind of curious because I'm trying
to get more analysts to say, is this way out
of line or is this in line? You know, so
without giving expectations, but you know, because I.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
Think sometimes broadly in line, broadly.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
Okay, So inline is the key, because I hear crazy
things from Tom Lee all the time, where we're going
to get to a twenty thousand dollars eighth and I'm
still kind of trying to digest that some because I
have a hard time getting there, but I always love
to hear it. But you know, just like I'm interested
to hear in JP Morgan say hey, we've got eight
billionaire and six billion there, you know, which is great.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Now, to be clear, brought broadly in line in terms
of potential inflows scaled to the Bitcoin and Ethereum experience
on price, you know that remains to be seen. I
am optimistic, certainly about the whole asset class.

Speaker 6 (16:43):
All right.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
So I've got a couple of other things here I
want to hit on. One is if you look at
the amount of allocation, and I'm you know, we've looked
at your platform here in terms of your holdings g
d LC, but this is the breakdown here. So it's
a five ETF holding basket. So you've got Coin leading
the weight at seventy five almost seventy five percent, and
then right behind that Ethereum, then you're coming in with

(17:07):
XRP and Salana these somewhat weight according to market cap.
Is this what you are proposing to investors when they
come into gray Scale and say I want to package
up some investments here. Is this kind of the model
you're proposing to them.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Well, we speak to every different type of investor that
you could imagine from individual retail investors to the world's
most sophisticated institutions, and they have a wide range of needs.
But one of our key messages is that crypto is
an emerging asset class, an important part of virtually every
diversified portfolio, and you don't want to miss the opportunity

(17:45):
in some bigger set. So there are lots of particulars,
as your viewers know, in getting up to speed on
blockchain technology and all these different assets, but you don't
want to miss the broader opportunity. So an index based
approach has been a very successful way to allocate to
different asset classes equities, bonds, and many other things, and

(18:06):
has also been a successful way to allocate to crypto.
We've been running this particular product since twenty eighteen and
it has an excellent track record. I think for investors
that don't want an overwhelming amount of complexity, want or
makes sure that they capture the crypto opportunity, capture the
beta in their portfolio, that the grayscale COINDESK Crypto five

(18:27):
ETF or the ticker GDLC that you mentioned can be
a great fit. But there's so many different types of investors.
That's why we have a broad product a suite, do
we customize it to investors needs.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
I'm looking at the coin market cap here and there
it is. You've got Solana setting at number six, XRP
at number four XRP holding a current market cap at
one hundred and fifty seven bill versus Solana holding in
at one oh seven. Do you think Solana can move
up the chart here again because at one time they
were above XRP in terms of marketcap? What's your opinion?

Speaker 3 (19:02):
It is a neck and neck race.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
I guess for that slot on the leader board, I
would just maybe highlight a couple of other things in there.
I mean, what that kind of leaderboard shows me is
first that the market perceives that the single most valuable
attribute of blockchain technologies today is the store of value
or digital gold use case provided by bitcoin. That that

(19:27):
jumps off the page with looking at this and all.
The other thing that jumps off the page is stable coins,
you know, Tether being very high on that list. Now,
between the rest of them, there's intense competition. I don't
want to kind of say that one will take take
the lead over the other necessarily. I do think that
Salona is a strong project and has a very diverse

(19:50):
and rich on chain economy, lots of applications, lots of developers,
lots of users, and that's why you can expect it
to sustain its value and grow over time. So I'm
thrilled to be able to offer that, to be able
to talk about our ETF product here today. And I
think Solana is a is a very strong project. But
of course it's a very diverse range of things happening

(20:12):
in that list of top tokens, from stable points to
digital gold.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
No doubt. I want to talk a touch on one
more point, and that is the narrative between AI and
stable coins. All Right, You've got Nvidia really kind of
cruising through a five trillion dollar model right now. You
got Solana jumping into the XO, the X four oh two.
We had the coin based team on yesterday breaking this down,
which is a huge opportunity in terms of agentic payments,

(20:40):
especially in micro transactions. When you look at that, what's
bigger right now? The AI narrative, I mean in video
is untouchable, it feels like, or the stable coin narrative,
which is just getting started.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
What do you think, Well, that's a tough question. I
think certainly in broader markets. It's hard to say that
anything but the AI trade is the biggest thing happening
in global finance today. In the crypto ecosystem, definitely, stable
coins are the biggest story, and these things do intersect
very clearly. In the future, we're going to have agents

(21:15):
acting on our behalf artificial intelligence agents, and they can't
have a bank account, they can't have a credit card,
but they can have an address on a blockchain and
use stable coins to make payments. So we absolutely think
that AI related payments will be one of the biggest
use cases of stable coins and a huge use case
of blockchain technology in general.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
No doubt. I'm going to end it today with Papa
Fink Larry Fink coming in. He was at the Mega
Finance summit talking about how the world isn't prepared and
I want to get your opinion on this. Take a look.

Speaker 7 (21:55):
You talked to central bankers regularly. What are the biggest
concerns today of central bankers about what's going on in
the global economy. I would say the biggest question from
central banks is what is the role of tokenization and digitization?
How quickly should they think about digitizing their own currency.
What does that mean for bank payments payment companies like

(22:15):
MasterCard and Visa. We're not spending enough time talking about
how quickly we're going to tokenize every financial asset a
digital wallet and moving you know, ETF and other things
through a digital wallet. And I think that's going to
happen worldwide very rapidly. Most countries are ill prepared for that,
and I underappreciate how technology is changing that, not unlike

(22:38):
how technology is changing AI.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
All right, so ill prepared countries are going to be
ill prepared for this. Zach, would you agree right now
that are people that far behind the eight ball here
or are we just drinking the kool aid in this industry?

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Well, you know, the US economy is incredibly dynamic, and
I know will adapt to all these changes. But I
agree with with Larry Fink here that people will be
astonished on how big these numbers get relatively quick, and
it's partly just how small.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
They are today.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
There are thirty billion dollars of tokenized assets today, which
sounds like a big number, but it is tiny compared
to the three hundred trillion dollars plus of tokenizable assets,
So it is a very, very small thing at its
very very beginning and will be a huge part of
our industry. So absolutely, you know, we are not prepared

(23:29):
for how big these numbers will look over the next
couple of years. Maybe your listeners are prepared, you know.
I think broader investors and regulator as still catching up.

Speaker 4 (23:38):
It is.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
It is kind of a situation right now because the
more we talk to traditional finance as this market grows,
it's drawing in trad fi not only money managers, investors, businesses,
technology companies, et cetera. And once they start opening up
to really what's happening in crypto, the light bulb moment
seems to come on. So it's intriguing that this is

(24:00):
happening now. Zach Pandal, great having you on the show.
Thank you so much for attending today.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
We appreciate it, my pleasure. Paul, thank you.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
All right, you guys, and you know what to do.
Make sure and jump into our own Diamond Circle. That's
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Speaker 3 (24:14):
It's absolutely free.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
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