Grayscale Litecoin Trust: Ticktock, Next Block Despite Premium Re-Rating

It's been four months since I last covered the Grayscale Litecoin Trust (OTCQX:LTCN) for Seeking Alpha. This trust is a closed-end fund that exists primarily to offer traditional market investors direct exposure to the native asset of the Litecoin (LTC-USD) blockchain. I've made no bones about my affinity for Litecoin as a network. However, despite my bullishness on Litecoin overall, I've called LTCN a "hold" each of the two times I covered the fund. In early April, I concluded with the following:

Four months have passed since my last coverage of the Grayscale Litecoin Trust (OTCQX:LTCN) for Seeking Alpha. This trust is a closed-end fund that primarily exists to provide traditional market investors with direct exposure to the native asset of the Litecoin (LTC-USD) blockchain. I've made no secret of my affinity for Litecoin as a network. However, despite my overall bullishness on Litecoin, I've called LTCN a "hold" each of the two times I covered the fund. In early April, I concluded with the following:

At a $46.85 share price, LTCN is implying a $438 Litecoin price. I'd love a $438 LTC price as much as the next Litecoin bull, but LTCN's premium simply has no fundamental justification. This fund traded at an even larger premium about 3 years ago. That doesn't mean we'll see those NAV rate levels return this time around.

As it turns out, my last LTCN article was published on the day of the highest close for the fund since 2021:

As you can see above, LTCN shares have collapsed by roughly 80% since then. This highlights the danger when playing the number go up game with crypto proxies via Grayscale.

Silly NAV Rate Games, Silly NAV Rate PrizesAs of 8/7/24 close, the premium rate on LTCN shares was just 97.5%. You can see in the chart below that, while still overvalued based on NAV, the premium rate has collapsed from 400% back in April. To put this into proper context; each share of LTCN represents 0.085 LTC. So for a crypto investor who wants to value LTCN based on the Litecoin exposure that each share actually holds, they have to multiply the LTC per share by the price of LTC.

In this case, we multiply 0.085 by a Litecoin price of $56.26, and we get a net asset value per share of $4.79. In essence, LTCN longs are willing to pay $9.46 for $4.79 in underlying value. And, again, this is actually an improvement over what bulls were doing just a few months ago.

The good thing is, LTCN doesn't have much further to go before it gets to what I'd view as a more fair valuation. And beyond that, LTCN is by no means the worst example of speculative froth from Grayscale's single asset closed end funds. The Grayscale Filecoin Trust (OTCPK:FILG) still claims that honor at a premium to NAV of over 800%.

Private PlacementsOver the years, we've seen the NAV rates for Grayscale's closed end fund products deviate dramatically in both directions. During 'crypto winter,' most of these products traded at deep discounts to net asset value - often as low as 50-60% of NAV. These proved to be wonderful opportunities for patient bulls to play the arbitrage game. One of the major reasons these NAV rates have been able to get so extreme in both directions is because they aren't ETFs. Thus, the assets underlying the fund can't be redeemed at NAV as they could through the ETF wrapper.

However, there is a mechanism for combating extreme premiums. Earlier this year, Grayscale re-opened private placements for the funds that were trading at large premiums to net asset value. Through private placements, accredited investors can buy new shares in the fund at NAV and wait through a one year lockup period to sell those newly issued shares on the secondary market. Private placers are essentially hoping the premiums stay high through their lockup expiration so they can buy at NAV, sell at a premium, and pocket the spread.

Source: Grayscale, Author's calculationsIn the table above, I'm showing the year to date change in shares outstanding for four of Grayscale's single asset crypto funds. Litecoin's year to date share growth has been just 25.9%. That might seem high, but compared to the aforementioned FileCoin fund, it's minimal. We can even see the Solana and Chainlink fund shares outstanding have doubled and tripled year to date. In my view, this is largely because those funds have had, and still have, dramatically higher NAV rate premiums than LTCN over the last several months. Thus, the post-lockup spread potential from private placement has been much more attractive in each of those funds.

LitecoinTo borrow a phrase from fans of a different cryptocurrency, it's largely been ticktock, next block for Litecoin despite the premium re-rating in LTCN. As far as utility goes, Litecoin is the only PoW coin that is even close to Bitcoin (BTC-USD) from a 30-day average active address standpoint:

As you can