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Grayscale's Chainlink ETF Sinks to $72M After LINK's 18% Slide

Published 3 days ago 3 min read
Grayscale's Chainlink ETF Sinks to $72M After LINK's 18% Slide

Grayscale's Chainlink ETF has fallen to roughly $72 million in assets following an 18% decline in LINK's price. The drop highlights how token volatility can quickly affect the value of crypto-focused investment products.

Key Takeaways

  • 01 The ETF's assets declined to about $72 million.
  • 02 LINK fell approximately 18%, weighing on the fund's value.
  • 03 The move underscores the sensitivity of single-asset crypto funds to underlying token prices.

A Routine Filing With Alarming Numbers

The quarterly report, covering the three months ended June 30, shows the Grayscale Chainlink Trust ETF (GLNK) holding 10,030,901.11 $LINK tokens as its sole asset. At the fund’s principal-market close, that stake was worth $72.2 million, unchanged in token count from the prior quarter but down sharply in dollar terms as Chainlink’s price slid.

Image source: SEC.gov

10-Q filings are routine disclosures every U.S.-listed fund must submit each quarter, and GLNK’s paperwork doesn’t break new regulatory ground. But the numbers inside it capture a token that has struggled since institutional investors got direct access to it. GLNK began trading on NYSE Arca on December 2, 2025, converting a Delaware trust that Grayscale had run privately since 2020 into a fund anyone with a brokerage account could buy.

GLNK’s fast route to market traces back to a rule change less than a year old. The SEC approved generic listing standards for crypto exchange-traded products in September 2025, letting exchanges like NYSE Arca list qualifying crypto trust conversions without the individualized rule-filing process that used to take the better part of a year. Grayscale used that faster runway to bring GLNK, along with several other single-asset trust conversions, to market within months.

$LINK’s Rough Quarter

The filing’s most telling figure is the token price marked at quarter-end, which stood at $7.25 (June 30), down from $8.77 when the prior 10-Q was filed in May. That’s an 18% drop in three months, and it dragged the trust’s net asset value (NAV) per share down to $6.38. Grayscale’s own math shows the toll, sitting on an unrealized loss of roughly $16.4 million on the $LINK stake for the quarter alone (even with the token count untouched).

Chainlink, the oracle network that feeds external data and price information to smart contracts on Ethereum and other blockchains, has had a volatile run since GLNK’s launch. And $LINK isn’t alone, given that most altcoins tied to onchain infrastructure have taken a beating this year even though bitcoin ETFs have staged a partial recovery in recent weeks.

For a single-asset trust like GLNK, there’s no diversification cushion since the fund’s fortunes move exactly as $LINK’s price does, for better or worse.

A Growth Story That Stalled

GLNK’s launch was strong by crypto-ETF standards. The fund pulled in $41 million in inflows on its first trading day, pushing assets under management to roughly $64 million within 48 hours. By April, AUM had climbed further to about $73 million, and some analysts projected the fund could reach $150 million to $300 million in a base case by mid-2026, with a bullish scenario running as high as $400 million to $600 million.

Those projections haven’t played out as the Q2 filing puts net assets at $72.2 million, essentially flat with April’s figure and well short of even the conservative growth case. That’s not because investors pulled money out (since the $LINK token count held steady all quarter) but simply because new inflows got absorbed by the 18% price decline.

Lower Fees, Same Playbook

One number in the filing that hasn’t moved is the sponsor’s fee. Grayscale charges 0.35% annually on GLNK’s assets, a rate it locked in when the trust converted to an ETF in December 2025 (down from the 2.5% it charged accredited investors under the old private-trust structure).

Grayscale also waived a portion of that fee through early March 2026 to smooth the transition, a pattern it has used across its other trust-to-ETF conversions. For the six months ended June 30, GLNK’s sponsor’s fees totaled roughly $136,000 against the fund’s average net assets, consistent with the stated 0.35% annual rate. It’s a small number next to the $16.4 million quarterly paper loss, but it shows how thin these single-asset crypto funds run.

Attribution

Originally reported by Cryptonews.net

#chainlink#grayscale#crypto#markets

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