Grayscale board resignations a show of ‘best behaviour’ before Bitcoin ETF nod

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s Barry Silbert and Mark Murphy resigned from the trust’s parent company, Grayscale Investments.

That’s according to a Tuesday SEC filing, which named Mark Shifke, Digital Currency Group’ chief financial officer, as Silbert’s successor as chair.

The departures come as the US Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to approve of a wave of more than a dozen applications for spot Bitcoin ETFs, including Grayscale’s own offering.

Silbert, founder and CEO of Grayscale parent Digital Currency Group, has faced lawsuits from New York Attorney General Letitia James for $1 billion in investor losses related to its Genesis subsidiary.

Mark Murphy has been DCG’s president since November 2022.

Silbert and Murphy submitted their resignations today, and will step down on January 1, the filing said.

Denied Application

The Grayscale Trust is a closed-end fund, but the company applied to convert it to an ETF back in 2021.

The SEC denied the application, alongside several other spot offerings from crypto-focused firms.

Then, in September, a court ruled that the SEC had made an error in its rejection, and ordered the agency to reappraise Grayscale’s application.

Shifke, who has been at the company since 2021, has almost four decades of financial and fintech experience, according to the filing. and more than eight years of CFO experience leading two publicly-traded companies.

Being a ‘good boy’

“This is Grayscale trying to show [the] SEC it is being a good boy and worthy of making [its] first tranche of launches,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas on X. “This is best behavior-type stuff.”

If and when the SEC greenlights the Bitcoin ETFs, Grayscale will suddenly find itself competing against heavyweights including Fidelity, BlackRock, and Ark Invest.

That means Grayscale’s position as the world’s largest institutional Bitcoin manager may be under threat.

Balchunas’ colleague, James Seyffart, wondered on X if the resignations may signal an eventual Grayscale sale.