Nasdaq requested the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for permission to list and trade shares of Grayscale’s Avalanche ETF. The company filed Form 19b-4 under the Securities and Exchange Commission Act of 1934 on March 28, 2025, to make this happen.
Grayscale Investments plans to convert its Avalanche Trust into an ETF for public trading on the stock market. Grayscale Investments, founded in 2013, is a U.S.-based digital asset management company offering cryptocurrency investment products. It operates as a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG).
Grayscale offers investment trusts that enable both institutional and retail investors to gain exposure to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche without the need to directly purchase or manage the assets.
While best known for the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), the company is expanding into exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other crypto investment products. Its latest venture is the Grayscale Avalanche Trust ETF.
The Grayscale Avalanche Trust is an investment product launched on August 22, 2024, to provide investors with a way to gain exposure to Avalanche (AVAX) without the need to directly buy, store, or manage the cryptocurrency themselves. However, Grayscale wants to tune it into an ETF.
An ETF is an investment fund that allows people to invest in assets like cryptocurrency without directly buying or managing them. Instead of owning AVAX directly, investors purchase shares of the ETF, which track the price of AVAX. This simplifies investing in AVAX through regular stock markets.
Before launching the Avalanche Trust, Grayscale already offered another product for investors to own AVAX: the Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC). This fund includes various cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and AVAX. In the third quarter of 2024, Grayscale requested the SEC to convert this fund into an ETF as well.
In March 2025, VanEck, a major asset management firm, filed for an AVAX ETF, marking the first standalone Avalanche ETF registration in the U.S. This move follows VanEck’s previous crypto ETF filings for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.
